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Alex Rios

@alexrios.me
73 followers 21 following 203 posts

Former Carioca 🏖 living in Curitiba 🏔 ⛩️ Supreme Leader ⛩️ Author of System Programming Essentials with Go & Learning Zig. Posts about Tech Leadership, Go and Zig. He/Him

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Reposted by Alex Rios
nark3d @nark3d.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Simplicity gets agreed and then broken by a flag added for one caller. Hard caps beat intentions, because the linter doesn't get tired at 5pm. Tenets don't stop the deadline, but a cap the build enforces does. prickles.org/tenet/simpli...
prickles.org
F4 Simplicity · Prickles
F4 Simplicity: No line of code is cheaper than the one you didn't write. Reasoning, evidence, the counter-argument and the reply, on Prickles.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 28/09/2026
I updated slogbox for Go 1.27 and JSON v2. I wrote about the migration decisions: what to preserve in the JSON output and how to handle errors after part of an HTTP response has already been sent. alexrios.me/blog/slogbox...
alexrios.me
Updating slogbox for Go 1.27
A Go 1.27 upgrade exposed a JSON contract, an HTTP error-design flaw, and a benchmark that looked fast because it failed early
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 28/09/2026
Atualizei o slogbox para Go 1.27 e JSON v2. Escrevi sobre as decisões da migração: o que preservar no JSON e como lidar com erros quando parte da resposta HTTP já foi enviada. alexrios.me/blog/slogbox...
alexrios.me
Atualizando o slogbox para o Go 1.27
A atualização para Go 1.27 expôs um contrato JSON, uma falha no design de erros HTTP e um benchmark que parecia rápido porque falhava cedo
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 27/09/2026
Hey Gophers, I need your help! What theme should I send to @gophercon.jp call for papers? I have only 2 submissions! Don't say Green Tea GC internals. It's the first one 🤓.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 14/09/2026
A module can look encapsulated while another reaches straight into its state. I wrote about transparent boundaries, with a Go example that moves mutation back to its owner. alexrios.me/blog/patholo...
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 14/09/2026
Continuando os posts sobre aspectos fundamentais de design 🌞 Nesse post, exploro as "fronteiras transparentes". alexrios.me/blog/patholo...
alexrios.me
Fronteiras transparentes
O encapsulamento que só existe na aparência
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 07/09/2026
Seguindo a série sobre fundamentos de design de software: flags booleanas e estados que não deveriam existir. alexrios.me/blog/bool-fl...
alexrios.me
Flags booleanas e estados que não deveriam existir
De parâmetros booleanos ambíguos a campos contraditórios: explicite as operações e modele apenas os estados que o domínio permite.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 07/09/2026
Continuing my posts on software design fundamentals, this time I’m looking at boolean flags and states our types should not allow.
alexrios.me
Boolean flags and states that should not exist
From ambiguous boolean parameters to contradictory struct fields: make operations explicit and model only the states the domain allows.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 07/09/2026
The world tour continues relentlessly. I keep submitting talks and somehow people keep accepting them. Next stop: GoLab 2026, Bologna 🇮🇹 Talking about Green Tea GC, Go’s new garbage collector, and why “scan spans, not objects” turns out to be a much bigger idea than it first appears.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 07/09/2026
My slides from GopherCon LATAM 2026 are now available: 🇧🇷 PT-BR talks.alexrios.me/gc-latam-26-... 🇪🇸 ES talks.alexrios.me/gc-latam-26-... 🌎 EN talks.alexrios.me/gc-latam-26-... Hope they’re useful even if you couldn’t make it to the talk.
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Reposted by Alex Rios
Konrad Reiche @konradreiche.com · 02/09/2026
Great talk from @alexrios.me on spin locks in Go at GopherCon Latam. They can outperform sync.Mutex, but only under a narrow set of conditions: a critical section under 100 ns, proven contention, multi-core deployment, and why Go generally favors safety, portability, and fairness over exposing them.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 22/08/2026
Tito Lívio diz que Roma reprimiu as Bacanais por assassinato, uso de veneno e fraude. O único documento oficial contemporâneo que sobreviveu não menciona nada disso. Ele fala de caixa, juramentos, cargos e reuniões. O que essa diferença revela?
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 20/08/2026
Most Go design problems don't start with architecture. They start with a function accepting more than it needs. I shared thoughts about precise signatures, small interfaces, and why every parameter should be an honest contract. alexrios.me/blog/stamp-c...
alexrios.me
Precision is the missing virtue in Go interfaces
Every parameter is a contract. Make it small enough to honor
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 19/08/2026
Processo dá uma sensação poderosa de controle. Quando a org cresce, essa sensação pode virar uma armadilha: mais etapas, mais aprovações, mais rituais e mais governança começam a parecer uma resposta para problemas que, muitas vezes, são de contexto, autonomia, competência ou desenho da cia.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 17/08/2026
Times raramente pulam design porque não se importam. Pulam porque design parece custoso hoje, enquanto fazem debugging, retrabalho e dor operacional chegam aos poucos durante os próximos dezoito meses. Essa troca quase sempre sai cara 😅 .
alexrios.me
Cortar design aumenta o custo total
Por que seu MVP continua levando dezoito meses
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 17/08/2026
Teams rarely skip design because they do not care. They skip it because design looks expensive today, while debugging, rework, and operational pain arrive quietly over the next eighteen months. That trade is usually a bad one.
alexrios.me
Underbudgeting design increases total cost
Why your MVP keeps taking eighteen months
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 12/08/2026
This is a premium post (and a long one). alexriosme.substack.com/p/the-cost-o...
alexriosme.substack.com
The cost of caring about software
AI made generating code cheap. Verifying it stayed expensive. The difference lands on whoever still checks.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 11/08/2026
A gente aprendeu a confundir confiança com competência. A WeWork chegou a valer US$ 47 bilhões porque Adam Neumann não vendia escritórios. Vendia certeza
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 11/08/2026
"Should this be a constant or a config value?" "Should we use DI here or construct it inline?" Same question, dressed up: when does this identifier get its final value?
alexrios.me
What does it take to change this?
Five binding times, named by what it costs to change them
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 07/08/2026
We often call something a “heuristic” when, in practice, it’s just a way to avoid understanding the problem. When a solution starts accumulating exceptions, weights, thresholds, and special rules, maybe the problem isn’t the algorithm. Maybe it’s the structure we chose to represent the problem.
alexrios.me
Clean code loses to the shape of the problem
The argument that quietly invalidates half of clean code advice
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 07/08/2026
Five AI agents don't give you five brains. They give one brain five sources of interruption. The numbers make the current multi-agent coding playbook look different. I wrote about the hidden cognitive cost of orchestrating agents, and the simple change that makes the model work much better.
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Reposted by Alex Rios
Raphael Amorim @raphamorim.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
Announcing Canario, a new terminal for macOS. It uses Rio under the hood 🐤 Spaces with their own colors (⌘1–9), splits, a ⌘K command bar, live tab previews, session restore, and a floating quick terminal on ⌥⌘T. macOS only for now, Linux and Windows are coming. rapha.land/canario
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 23/07/2026
Saying review is the bottleneck isn't news. In my new post, I explore why your seniority works through "chunking," why AI diffs blow your cognitive budget, and how to survive reviewing code written at industrial volume.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 15/07/2026
Hey! Almost forgot to share the slides from GopherCon Europe 2026 Here goes nothing: docs.google.com/presentation... #gopherconEU
docs.google.com
Alex Rios - Green Tea GC - Gophercon EU 26
Green Tea The Insight Behind Go's New Garbage Collector Berlin, Jun 15 2026 Alex Rios Memed alexrios.me
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 13/07/2026
"Só uma crise, real ou percebida, produz mudança real." - Milton Friedman, 1982. Chile 73, Rússia 91, Iraque 03, Nova Orleans 05, COVID 20. Mesmo padrão, cinco vezes. Escrevi sobre como isso funciona (e por que talvez nem precise ser conspiração).
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 10/07/2026
Dois engenheiros, sintomas idênticos: exaustão, cinismo, desempenho em queda. As causas são completamente diferentes, e confundir as duas é o que faz com que o burnout nunca se resolva de verdade.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 29/06/2026
Images are overrated 😜
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 29/06/2026
Em 2017, cinco bilionários pagaram uma fortuna pra um autor responder uma pergunta: como manter a lealdade dos guardas armados do bunker depois que o dinheiro virar papel? Eles tratam o fim do mundo como uma questão de quando, não de se. E têm um plano. Spoiler: não funciona.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 24/06/2026
Mais poderosa do que muitos países, mas sem prestar contas a ninguém. O verdadeiro império do futebol opera segundo suas próprias regras. 🌍⚽️ Leia o novo post: A FIFA é um país que ninguém pode auditar.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 03/06/2026
Novo ensaio! A transição de Senior para Principal é, na maior parte, maturidade aplicada sob pressão, somada a algumas fraturas específicas que a indústria raramente nomeia. A seção final usa Espinosa e prometo que, no contexto, fica menos pretensioso do que soa aqui.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 03/06/2026
O Congo tem 24 trilhões de dólares em minerais no subsolo. O congolês médio vive com menos de 2 dólares por dia. Isso não é acidente. É design. Patrice Lumumba entendeu isso em 1960, disse em voz alta, e viveu mais seis meses.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 25/05/2026
No outro post eu falei sobre coesão. Chegou a hora de falar de acoplamento. alexrios.me/blog/couplin...
alexrios.me
Como eu penso sobre acoplamento, de verdade
Dois eixos, não uma lista
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 25/05/2026
I talked about cohesion; now it's time to talk about coupling. alexrios.me/blog/couplin...
alexrios.me
How I think about coupling
Two axes, not one list
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 21/05/2026
A velocidade de produção de código aumentou. O senso de design, não. A coesão continua sendo o que o revisor precisa trazer. alexrios.me/blog/cohesio...
alexrios.me
Coesão na era das entregas mais rápidas que nunca
O que o código gerado por IA continua errando sobre coesão
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 21/05/2026
The speed of code production is up. The taste isn't. Cohesion is what the reviewer still has to bring. alexrios.me/blog/cohesio...
alexrios.me
Cohesion in the era of shipping faster than ever
What AI-shipped code keeps getting wrong about cohesion
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 19/05/2026
DRY was originally about knowledge, not characters. Two pieces of code can look identical and represent completely unrelated facts about the world. A rule I've used for a decade to filter the "I should DRY this up" instinct. alexrios.me/blog/dry-coi...
alexrios.me
The helper that ate the codebase
How well intentioned DRY refactors produce the worst modules I've seen
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 19/05/2026
The title says it all.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 18/05/2026
21% das peer reviews submetidas a uma das conferências mais importantes de machine learning foram inteiramente geradas por IA. Citações alucinadas. Feedback que não engajou com o paper.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 17/05/2026
While prepping my GopherCon EU talk, I was reading Go's CPU detection code and spotted a one-line nesting mistake that has silently disabled GFNI detection on every consumer-grade Intel CPU shipped since 2021 (Alder Lake, Raptor Lake, the N-series mini-PCs, all of it).
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 15/05/2026
New essay! The Floor and the Fractures. The Senior-to-Principal transition is mostly adulthood applied under pressure, plus specific fractures the industry rarely names. The closing section uses Spinoza, which I promise is less pretentious in context than it sounds here.
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Reposted by Alex Rios
GopherCon Europe @gopherconeu.bsky.social · 08/05/2026
#gopherconEU Speaker Spotlight #Golang 1.26's new Green Tea GC uses a cryptographic instruction for bitmap expansion. @alexrios.me read the runtime code to understand why and will walk through the real implementation: mark bits, span queues and the ownership protocol behind it. www.gophercon.eu
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 11/05/2026
Uma skill viral do Claude Code prometia 75% de economia em tokens, fazendo o assistente falar como um homem das cavernas. Testei contra um prompt de três palavras: "Responda conciso. Seja breve e direto ao ponto." A skill mal ganha das três palavras. Em um dos modelos, perde.
open.substack.com
Existe uma razão para o homem das cavernas ser um personagem do passado
Os tokens que você não vê são os caros
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 05/05/2026
"Pragmatic" has been quietly inverted in our industry. The philosophical tradition defined pragmatism as evaluating ideas by their practical consequences. That requires thought directed at outcomes. The modern engineering usage tends to mean the opposite: skip the thought, just act.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 17/04/2026
Migrated my zero-allocation UUID library to Zig 0.16. alexrios.me/blog/migrati...
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 15/04/2026
I'm fairly certain you've approved a PR without really reading it. The junior got a green checkmark. Moved on. Never learned why the abstraction was wrong. The feedback loop closed. Nothing traveled through it. And this goes way beyond code review.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 15/04/2026
Um trilhão de dólares evaporou do mercado de software em fevereiro. O mercado batizou de SaaSpocalypse. A gente age como se fosse a primeira vez que uma indústria inteira descobre que virou commodity. Não é. Esse filme passa a cada duas ou três décadas.
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Reposted by Alex Rios
Jesús Espino @jespino.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
I finally published my book about Postgres! Check it out here: lnkd.in/eakHPn6E Thanks @alexrios.me for the very good feedback, and @franckpachot.bsky.social for taking the time on reading the book and writing the foreword. More details here: www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-boo...
lnkd.in
LinkedIn
This link will take you to a page that’s not on LinkedIn
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 07/04/2026
O silêncio do seu melhor engenheiro é muito mais perigoso do que as reclamações dele. 🧵 Se ele parou de questionar ideias ruins e agora só diz "o que o time decidir", ele não ficou "maduro". Ele está esmaecendo.
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 02/04/2026
Shipped a UUID library with all tests green. Found silent data corruption hours later: bitCast on a negative timestamp produces a UUID from the year 10889. No panic, no error. Just wrong. #Zig alexrios.me/blog/uuid-zi...
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Alex Rios @alexrios.me · 31/03/2026
Engineers still repeat NoSQL limitations from 2013 as if nothing changed. I went through every claim one by one. PostgreSQL addressed them all. The rest is engineering theater. alexrios.me/blog/choosin...
alexrios.me
Let's talk about choosing a database in 2026
Thirteen years after Making Sense of NoSQL, most of its claims are debunked. PostgreSQL should be your default, with specialized databases added only when you have measured evidence.
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