Field Signal · Curated Reading
The Engineering
Signal.
High-signal field notes, architecture teardowns, and engineering writing from 50 publications. A focused reading queue for becoming a stronger end-to-end engineer. Updated 20 Aug.
Our Best Customers Are Now Robots
We’re Fly.io, a developer-focused public cloud. We turn Docker containers into hardware-isolated virtual machines running on our own metal around the world. We spent years coming up with a developer experience we were proud of. But now the robots are taking over, and they don’t care. It’s weird to s...
Discord Patch Notes: April 3, 2025
Check out the finer details of the more technical fixes implemented into Discord recently.
Staff Picks, April 2025: All The Adaptations
With all the new video game adaptations coming out in April, we’re asking Veronica, Cody, and Emi what their favorite ones have been so far and which games deserve a great adaptation that has yet to come.
MAJOR NEWS: DISCORD ANNOUNCES ITS FIRST IN-HOUSE AAAA VIDEO GAME, “THE LAST MEADOW”
Discord’s new in-house studio Big Wump Games announces its first release: The Last Meadow. Available from April 1 to April 7, 2025 exclusively on Discord.
Checkpoint 2: Our First Year With Discord Quests
In 2024, we launched Quests, an innovative rewarded ad format designed for Discord’s gaming audience. Join us as we look back at over 70 campaigns run during our first year.
How to Create & Upload Your Own Stickers on Discord
Stickers on Discord let you express yourself in BIG ways. Learn how to create, upload, and use stickers on Discord.
Operationalizing Macaroons
We’re Fly.io, a security bearer token company with a public cloud problem. You can read more about what our platform does (Docker container goes in, virtual machine in Singapore comes out), but this is just an engineering deep-dive into how we make our security tokens work. It’s a tokens nerd post. ...
Why We Designed TigerBeetle's Docs from Scratch
We recently rebuilt TigerBeetle’s docs site from scratch. We wanted to apply TigerStyle and first principles thinking, not only to our database but also to our docs. To give users the fastest possible experience, given how much time they spend reading, and to do this without the dependency of Docusa...
Taming A Voracious Rust Proxy
Here’s a fun bug. The basic idea of our service is that we run containers for our users, as hardware-isolated virtual machines (Fly Machines), on hardware we own around the world. What makes that interesting is that we also connect every Fly Machine to a global Anycast network. If your app is runnin...
We Were Wrong About GPUs
We’re building a public cloud, on hardware we own. We raised money to do that, and to place some bets; one of them: GPU-enabling our customers. A progress report: GPUs aren’t going anywhere, but: GPUs aren’t going anywhere. A couple years back, we put a bunch of chips down on the bet that people shi...
A Descent Into the Vörtex
We’re huge fans of Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) at TigerBeetle, which enables us to perfectly reproduce complex failures of a distributed system on a single laptop. But that’s not today’s story! We’ve added an intentionally non-deterministic testing harness, the Vörtex!
The Exit Interview: JP Phillips
JP Phillips is off to greener, or at least calmer, pastures. He joined us 4 years ago to build the next generation of our orchestration system, and has been one of the anchors of our engineering team. His last day is today. We wanted to know what he was thinking, and figured you might too. Question ...
A Blog, If You Can Keep It
A boldfaced lede like this was a sure sign you were reading a carefully choreographed EffortPost from our team at Fly.io. We’re going to do less of those. Or the same amount but more of a different kind of post. Either way: launch an app on Fly.io today! Over the last 5 years, we’ve done pretty well...
Did Semgrep Just Get A Lot More Interesting?
This whole paragraph is just one long sentence. God I love just random-ass blogging again. This bit by Geoffrey Huntley is super interesting to me and, despite calling out that LLM-driven development agents like Cursor have something like a 40% success rate at actually building anything that passes ...
VSCode’s SSH Agent Is Bananas
We’re interested in getting integrated into the flow VSCode uses to do remote editing over SSH, because everybody is using VSCode now, and, in particular, they’re using forks of VSCode that generate code with LLMs. ”hallucination” is what we call it when LLMs get code wrong; “engineering” is what we...