Julian Bonomini
Hi, I'm Julian. I've been a software engineer for about ten years, these days mostly doing systems stuff (Rust, Zig, networking, crypto) plus whatever side quest got me that week. I write it down here so I don't forget, wrong turns included.
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Where/what is my value as an engineer today?2026-10Agents write most of the code now. Understanding what they built isn't enough IMO. 2 day debug session2026-05It works on my machine, at its finest. A or B, not A/B2026-05A/B testing can turn into a way to skip the thinking. Sometimes you have to pick A or B. Knowledge vs experience in SWE2025-11Ten years of getting humbled, why experience beats knowledge, and why you should say yes to the shitty projects. A learning framework to fight AI brain rot2025-11How I'm learning Rust and Zig in parallel without letting AI do the learning for me: knowledge bases, project logs and a healthy amount of suffering.Latest writing
Branding a primitive2026-09Nobody installs a sync library just because it exists, so even a primitive needs a brand. Hiding IPs from my own relay is harder than it sounds2026-08I wanted my relay to never see IPs. I ended up changing the sentence instead. TrueSeal delivery guarantees2026-08My sync library promised every message arrives. It does, sometimes twice, and I changed my mind about who should deal with that. Membership without a server2026-08A group of devices with nobody in charge of who's in it, and the three ways that went wrong. Messages from the future2026-07My sync protocol keeps messages it can't read yet, so anyone could fill a device's inbox with junk labelled version 99. Noise protocol its not concurrent2026-07Two goroutines, one cipher state, and a non concurrent safe library. All 26 postsProjects
End-to-end encrypted sync for Swift, Kotlin and TypeScript apps, with a relay you run yourself.
Builds a goal in your repo while you're away, ticket by ticket, and hands back one pull request.
Hypertrophy training for iPhone and Apple Watch that bumps the weight once you hit the top of your rep range.
An alarm that reads tomorrow's calendar and wakes you at the right time, computed on the phone.
One clipboard history across your iPhone, Android and Mac, end-to-end encrypted and with no accounts.
Static analysis that hands an LLM your call graph so it stops guessing its way around a codebase. Abandoned.