Software development
fromMedium
1 day agoAsync Logging Is Not a Silver Bullet - What Actually Limits Performance
Async logging redistributes costs rather than reducing them, impacting performance in different ways depending on implementation.
We will be retiring the beta shortly and will be removing the button to get to it and ceasing support for it. The beta garnered negative feedback from the Stack Overflow community, including observations that it looked more like a general discussion site such as Reddit and was losing the essence of what made it successful: precise questions and community-validated answers.
Every iOS app I've shipped over the last nine years started the same way: a Rails developer with a great web app, users who want it in the App Store, and weeks spent on Xcode, signing certificates, and Swift boilerplate that has nothing to do with the actual product.
New overloads on TarFile.CreateFromDirectory accept a TarEntryFormat parameter, giving direct control over the archive format. Previously, CreateFromDirectory produced Pax archives. The new overloads support all four tar formats—Pax, Ustar, GNU, and V7—for compatibility with specific tools and environments.
I began by creating a soft link locally from my blog's repo of posts to the src/pages/posts of a new Astro site. My blog currently has 6742 posts (all high quality I assure you). Each one looks like so: --- layout: post title: "Creating Reddit Summaries with URL Context and Gemini" date: "2026-02-09T18:00:00" categories: ["development"] tags: ["python","generative ai"] banner_image: /images/banners/cat_on_papers2.jpg permalink: /2026/02/09/creating-reddit-summaries-with-gemini description: Using Gemini APIs to create a summary of a subreddit. --- Interesting content no one will probably read here...
While the codebase is fresh and grows fast under the umbrella of the local environment, we tend to rely on debugging tools, which were created specifically for that purpose. The app is half-baked, and the code is split open. We observe it through the lens of our IDE and with the speed of our brain. Everything is possible; we may pause execution for minutes, and the whole system is a white box - an open book for us.
Which Algorithm Is This? If you step back, this maps almost perfectly to the Top K Frequent Elements problem.We usually solve it for integers in a list. Here, the "elements" are audience profiles age and body-type combinations. First, define what an audience profile looks like: case class Profile(age: Int, height: Int, weight: Int) What we want is a function like this:
The software industry is collectively hallucinating a familiar fantasy. We visited versions of it in the 2000s with offshoring and again in the 2010s with microservices. Each time, the dream was identical: a silver bullet for developer productivity, a lever managers can pull to make delivery faster, cheaper, and better. Today, that lever is generative AI, and the pitch is seductively simple: If shipping is bottlenecked by writing code, and large language models can write code instantly, then using an LLM means velocity should explode.
At that point, backpressure and load shedding are the only things that retain a system that can still operate. If you have ever been in a Starbucks overwhelmed by mobile orders, you know the feeling. The in-store experience breaks down. You no longer know how many orders are ahead of you. There is no clear line, no reliable wait estimate, and often no real cancellation path unless you escalate and make noise.
The headline runtime feature in this preview is Runtime Async, described as a major change to how asynchronous methods work in .NET. According to the release notes, since C# 5 introduced async/await, the compiler has been solely responsible for rewriting async methods into state machine structs that track progress across suspension points. With Runtime Async, the runtime itself now understands async methods as a first-class concept and takes over responsibility for suspending and resuming methods.
One thing I always do when I prompt a coding agent is to tell it to ask me any questions that it might have about what I've asked it to do. (I need to add this to my default system prompt...) And, holy mackerel, if it doesn't ask good questions. It almost always asks me things that I should have thought of myself.