I’m Nick Babcock, a software engineer with 10+ years of fullstack and DevOps experience earned as the principal developer on flagship products.
You might know me from my open source work, or from one of my many articles covering topics from authoring Wasm libraries to intricacies in Rust to edge compute to React component design.
The DuckDB and Arrow rabbit hole: data modeling adventures
Published on: I didn’t understand the hype around Duckdb until recently, where I wanted to share data and Duckdb was the perfect fit. While powerful, it has rough edges, such as limited ecosystem support for tagged unions and substantial Wasm payload sizes for web deployment. Still, DuckDB has me excited to revisit how I structure bespoke data queries.
A Bevy app entirely off the main thread
Published on: There are several options for how to structure a Bevy app for the web. I’m a proponent of shifting as much as possible to web workers, but shifting an entire Bevy app to a web worker is going to require elbow grease as we ditch the builtin windowing system.
Wasm's curious word size and the SWAR advantage
Published on: Journey through WebAssembly’s architectural quirk: 32-bit addressing with 64-bit operations.How does this impact SWAR techniques to turn this unusual combination into a performance advantage? Let’s benchmark this bit wizardry in a whitespace skipping scenario!
Default musl allocator considered harmful (to performance)
Published on: In a real world benchmark, the default musl allocator caused a 7x slowdown compared to other allocators. I recommend all Rust projects immediately swap to a different allocator in a musl environment.
The right tool for the job: positioned IO for Zip archives
Published on: What is thepread syscall and why do Zip implementations favor it to unlock powerful concurrent decompression? And how can we emulate pread on systems without that syscall? And what does Go and .NET have to do with it?
Keeping up with the fronted Joneses: streaming server side rendering
Published on:Streaming server side rendering. Edge compute. Web app architecture advancements are making classic SPAs appear long in the tooth. While it can be irritating to try and keep up with these advancements, they bring tangible benefits.
It’s time to say goodbye Next.js and hello Remix.
Cloudflare's forbidden Steam
Published on: Cloudflare workers face 403 forbidden errors with Steam’s OpenID. Is Steam detecting Cloudflare via IP addresses or is there a difference in what requests originating from Cloudflare look like?
The hidden nuance of the JavaScript File API
Published on:Did you know that the files originating from a file input don’t have all their data buffered into memory? Seems intuitive that this is how JS would work, otherwise web sites operating over files would be terribly memory inefficient.
Don’t let this efficient File deceive you.
