Code Comprehension in the Age of AI
Two habits that keep your understanding of a codebase from falling behind what you ship.
~/victorpierre.dev ❯ ls blog/
Blog
Notes on software engineering, systems design, tools, and the occasional reflection on working and living with technology.
Disclaimer
This is a collection of blog posts. They are mostly written to improve my writing skills and share my thoughts on various topics. They capture my thoughts at a specific point in time and may not reflect my current thinking. They are also not representative of my employer’s views, only my own.
Please take them with a grain of salt. They can be outdated, inaccurate, and I may have changed my mind since then. I hope you find them useful. Please feel free to reach out on Mastodon if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.
Archive
Latest writing
What We Lose When We Build Alone
Teams were never just parallel typing. What building solo with AI quietly costs.
Aligning Go struct fields to save memory
Reordering struct fields to cut padding, and the tools that find the waste for you.
Building a Personal Knowledge System with Obsidian
How I use Obsidian to keep notes findable, linked, and local-first.
Dual-Writes and the Outbox Pattern
Fixing dual-write bugs by writing events to the database alongside the data that caused them.
Cooperation Without Dependency
Why digital dependence is a strategic risk, and how open standards offer a way out.
2025 - Retrospective
Photography, work, and reading: reflections on 2025 and hopes for the year ahead.
Distributed Tracing in Go
Instrumenting Go services with OpenTelemetry and Jaeger to follow a request end to end.
Stacked git branches with git-spice
Keeping small, reviewable pull requests in sync with stacked Git branches.
2024 - Retrospective
A year-end look back at the work, travel, and changes that shaped 2024.
Reproducible macOS Configurations with Nix
Building a reproducible macOS setup with Nix flakes and nix-darwin.
User-centric feature design
A framework for planning features around users when you rarely get to talk to them.
Resilience and Mental Wellness in Uncertain Times
Notes on stoicism, resilience, and looking after your mind in an unstable industry.
Hasten Slowly in Software Development
Make haste slowly: why the fastest way to ship is usually the deliberate one.
Go Interfaces: Five Best-Practices for Enhanced Code Maintainability
Five practices that keep Go interfaces small, useful, and easy to maintain.
Enhancing Data Access with the Decorator Pattern in Go
Stacking caching, logging, and instrumentation onto a data layer with Go interfaces.
A Beginner's Guide to Semantic Versioning
What each number in a version means, and when to bump which one.
Understanding Zero Values in Go
What Go gives a variable before you do, and how to put zero values to work.
Escaping the internet's walled gardens
The Fediverse, ActivityPub, and the case for a more decentralized internet.
How I organize (most of) my Go microservices
The folder structure I use for Go microservices, and why I skip frameworks.
End-to-End tests with Venom
Writing end-to-end and integration tests in plain YAML with OVH's Venom.
An introduction to Protocol Buffers 3
What Protocol Buffers are, how the syntax works, and why they are worth learning.
Five useful terminal tools for Developers
Five command line tools I keep coming back to: chezmoi, delta, lazydocker, lazygit, and bat.
