Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

A Microsoft Engineer's Encounter with Raymond Chen: Preprocessors and BitLocker Error Messages

2025-09-21

In 2009, a young Microsoft BitLocker developer sought a way to reference C++ constant values within .mc files to improve BitLocker's error messages. He reached out to an internal mailing list and received a concise yet effective reply from Raymond Chen: use the preprocessor. However, fearing a disruption to the complex Windows build system, the developer ultimately abandoned the approach. Years later, he reflects on this experience, highlighting shortcomings in Microsoft's internal tooling and his own avoidance of complex build systems.

Gleam First Impressions: Parsing Old AIM Logs

2025-09-13

The author uses the relatively new functional programming language Gleam to parse their old AOL Instant Messenger logs from two decades ago. The post details their learning process, covering command-line argument handling, compilation, testing, and functional programming techniques like pattern matching and pipeline operators. The author shares their positive experiences with Gleam's elegant pipeline syntax, but also points out shortcomings such as its limited standard library and slightly awkward error handling.

Seven Years Post-Google: Selling My Company & Becoming a Dad

2025-02-04

Seven years ago, Michael Lynch left his job at Google to bootstrap his own software company. This year's update covers the sale of his million-dollar-revenue remote computer control device company, TinyPilot, for $600k, and the arrival of his first child. The sale allowed for better work-life balance; he's since refined a previous blogging course, started a book on writing for developers, and explored new technologies like Nix, htmx, and Zig, improving his fuzz testing workflow with Nix. He remains enthusiastic about independent founding.