Julio Merino (jmmv.dev)

Addressing Bazel OOMs

Here at Snowflake, the Developer Productivity organization (DPE for short) is tackling some important problems we face as a company: namely, lengthening build times and complex development environments. A key strategy we are pursuing to resolve these is the migration of key build processes from CMake and Maven to Bazel. We are still in the early stages of this migration and cannot yet share many details or a success story, but we can start explaining some of the issues we encounter as we work through this ambitious project.

March 16, 2023 · Tags: bazel, snowflake
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Introducing III-IV

Over the last couple of years, I have developed two small web services in Rust: one for EndBASIC and one for this blog. Those two web services contained significant copy/pasted helper code, which always bothered me because small bug fixes in one rarely propagated to the other. But because this only impacted two inconsequential side projects, the hinderance wasn’t a big deal. Until now. I now face the need to write two more web services (details TBA), and duplicating those foundations twice more felt just wrong. So I spent the last couple of weeks pulling the common code out of the existing services into a… you guessed it… framework, which I have called III-IV ("three four" if you read it out loud) and am ready to announce. Find the code in https://github.com/jmmv/iii-iv.

March 13, 2023 · Tags: iii-iv
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BASIC parsing difficulties in EndBASIC

The original BASIC parser in EndBASIC 0.1 was very rudimentary and it stayed pretty much unmodified until the 0.10 release last month. This release brought major changes to the parser to support new features, but it wasn’t easy to implement them. In this post, I want to look into various difficulties that arose implementing certain BASIC constructs in EndBASIC. Overcoming these difficulties was difficult, but it was also fascinating because it gave me a glimpse of the design choices that the original BASIC designers must have faced. Capturing these ah-ha moments in a post is also tricky, but I’ll try anyway.

January 13, 2023 · Tags: endbasic
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EndBASIC 0.10: Core language, evolved

After three months of early-morning hacking, I’m pleased to announce that EndBASIC 0.10 is now available—right on time for some holiday-time experimentation! This release marks a huge milestone because it makes the language usable for real-world development. You see, when I started this project over two years ago, I wrote a rudimentary interpreter for something that resembled BASIC and then launched EndBASIC 0.1. Since then, I have been piling onto those insufficient foundations by adding flashy features such as a web interface, a cloud file sharing service, and a hybrid text/graphics console.

December 27, 2022 · Tags: endbasic, featured
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From AST to bytecode execution in EndBASIC

Since its inception two years ago, the EndBASIC interpreter has been using an AST-based execution engine. And during all this time, people have mocked the language for not allowing 10 GOTO 10. Well, fear not: the upcoming 0.10 release has full support for GOTO and GOSUB, features that were made possible by moving to a bytecode-based interpreter. Let’s take a peek at what the problems were and how I addressed them.

November 22, 2022 · Tags: endbasic, rust
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Farewell, Microsoft; hello, Snowflake!

After two years, it’s time for a change: I left Microsoft last week and I’m starting at Snowflake today. Read on for details on my stint in Azure Storage, why I ended up looking for a new role, and how I landed at this new company.

October 31, 2022 · Tags: featured, microsoft, personal-story, snowflake
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Tips on formatting Markdown lists

Lists are a very common construct in technical documents, which is the kind of material I most often write and review. But getting complex lists to look right is tricky, especially when authoring them in Markdown. Let’s look at a couple of tips to ensure that any list you write will always be correctly formatted with ease.

July 7, 2022 · Tags: markdown, readability
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