Latest
№47
Learn Backward. Act Forward.
I had understood the mistake. That was not the same as being ready to continue.
Corentin Giaufer Saubert
I build software for a living — and write about the work, the traces it leaves, and who I'm becoming along the way.
Writing since 2022 · 47 entries · Software, chess, design, and the occasional detour
Browse by subject
Five threadsThe writing sorts into a handful of topics — pick the one that matches what you're after.
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Go & concurrency
Concurrency patterns, performance trade-offs, and Go code you can reason about.
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Software design & testing
TDD, domain modelling, and the boundaries that make code safer to change.
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Design & culture
Interfaces, Japanese web design, and the context behind design choices.
Latest — Beyond Minimalism: A Japanese-Inspired UX for the Web
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Notes on practice
Books, travel, identity, and the ideas that shape how I work.
Latest — Learn Backward. Act Forward.
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Projects
Building production tools — codegen, transpilers, chess software — and the trade-offs each one exposed.
Latest — Beyond Unicorn: Why I Code-Gen Instead of Emulating
Latest entries
47 total №47
Learn Backward. Act Forward.
I had understood the mistake. That was not the same as being ready to continue.
Notes on practice 4 min
№46
We Put Full-Text Search in PostgreSQL, Then ClickHouse. Both Were the Wrong Place.
The logs table stored trace IDs, users, token counts, latency, prompt input, model output, metadata, and variables. We used the same table to show one trace, graph cost by day, filter a feature’s recent spans, and find text a user remembered typing three weeks ago.
Devlog 6 min
№45
Begin Again Without Pretending Nothing Happened
At 6 p.m., a client called because their production site was down.
Notes on practice 5 min
№44
PostgreSQL Was Down Again: Rebuilding LLM Trace Ingestion
At 6 p.m. on December 19, 2025, the product was down again.
Devlog 12 min
№43
The Discipline of Returning
I had a winning position against a grandmaster at the Karen Asrian Memorial Tournament.
Notes on practice 6 min
№42
GitHub Stacked Pull Requests: What Changed in Preview
GitHub announced stacked pull requests in public preview on July 30. The workflow is older than the announcement. Developers have built dependent branches, opened one pull request per branch, and rebased the chain by hand for years. Dedicated tools made that less painful. GitHub itself saw unrelated pull requests with unusual base branches.
Systems & tooling 10 min
№41
You Are Only as Good as Your Next Pass
After a mistake, I can lose the next move before I make it.
Notes on practice 5 min
More by year
Some part of a mistake is always correct.