Blog – Victor Pierre

Code Comprehension in the Age of AI

Sun, 30 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Tower of Babel

Bruegel’s structure built faster than anyone could hold it in their head.

Until recently, understanding code was a byproduct of writing it. To implement a feature, however small, you first had to understand what you were trying to do, then work out how to do it, write the code, make mistakes, and fix them. Every line was written by you, every variable name chosen by you, every alternative carefully considered. You spent so much time thinking through how a feature should work and how it should fit into the existing code that, by the time you were finished, you understood it very well. When a bug was reported, I would instinctively know where to fix it. That’s how well I knew the codebases I used to work on.

What We Lose When We Build Alone

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The School of Athens

Raphael’s fresco of philosophers thinking together, not alone.

Spend any time on LinkedIn and you get the impression that with AI, one person can now do the work of a team. Soon there will be one-person unicorns. Why hire engineers, designers, or product people when a founder with the right prompts can ship it all alone?

Aligning Go struct fields to save memory

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A printer’s composing case

each sort of movable type packed so no space is wasted.

Building a Personal Knowledge System with Obsidian

Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Aztec obsidian blade

Louis Petich Collection, 13th–16th century.

I tend to write things down a lot. I like to write notes during meetings, as I think through problems, as I need to prepare for a presentation, or a large task, or when I just need to remember something later, that I know I’ll forget.

Dual-Writes and the Outbox Pattern

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Great Courier

Alois Petrak (Czech, 1811–1888).

Your daily reconciliation job flags a problem: dozens of orders exist in your database, but no corresponding events ever reached Kafka. The email service never sent confirmations. The inventory service never reserved stock. After some digging, you find the culprit - Kafka had a brief hiccup yesterday and returned errors for a few publish attempts. The database writes succeeded, but without the outbox pattern, those events were simply lost.

Cooperation Without Dependency

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Allegory of the 1st Partition of Poland

the European powers carving up a nation.

“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday’s logic.”

2025 - Retrospective

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As we approach the end of 2025, I want to reflect once again on what I’ve experienced and learned this year, as well as my hopes and goals for the next. I’m reminded of how fortunate I am to have had the experiences and opportunities I’ve had.

Personal

I’ve revived an old hobby: photography. This is something I’ve always enjoyed. I remember when I was 10 or 11, my parents got me an old Kodak Instamatic 333-X (I think) camera that was popular in the 60s and 70s. By the 90s, it was being rebranded and promoted as a cheap camera for kids, complete with Disney characters and all. I must still have some of those random pictures at my parents’ house.

Distributed Tracing in Go

Wed, 08 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Silk-throwing by hand

the thread traced between two fixed points. (The Penny Magazine, 1843)

Stacked git branches with git-spice

Thu, 05 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Ever find yourself working on a feature where the choice is between one massive PR that nobody wants to review, or waiting for each small change to be merged before you can start the next? Some features split naturally into smaller PRs, but keeping those PRs in sync as review feedback comes in is painful.

2024 - Retrospective

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As 2024 draws to a close, I want to put into words my year-end reflection. It’s been an eventful journey filled with opportunities and unexpected changes.

Personal: I feel so lucky

Despite worrisome global events, I find myself profoundly grateful for my personal circumstances - I’m in good health, I love what I do for a living, and I’m always surrounded by better people than me.

Reproducible macOS Configurations with Nix

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What is Nix?

Nix is a package manager ¹ for Linux and macOS. Together with nix-darwin, it lets you describe much of your macOS setup in a configuration file. A flake can pin dependencies, making that setup easier to reproduce on another machine.

A key component of the Nix ecosystem is Nixpkgs, the default repository of Nix packages, which contains thousands of searchable packages that you can easily integrate into your configuration.

User-centric feature design

Sun, 26 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Early in my career, I did regular client demos and feedback sessions, and the features that worked best were always the ones designed around the people using them. At larger companies, users are further away and engineers spend more time on implementation, but I’ve tried to keep the same user-first habit.

Resilience and Mental Wellness in Uncertain Times

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Gulf Stream

Winslow Homer, 1899.

Hasten Slowly in Software Development

Sun, 24 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The dolphin and anchor

Aldus Manutius’s printer’s mark for festina lente.

According to Suetonius, the Roman emperor Augustus was fond of the maxim Festina Lente, usually translated as Make Haste Slowly. It sounds like a contradiction, but the idea is simple: the fastest way to a goal is rarely the hurried one. Rushing creates the mistakes that slow you down.

Go Interfaces: Five Best-Practices for Enhanced Code Maintainability

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

When you’re coding in Go, you’ll quickly come to appreciate interfaces. An interface in Go is a type that spells out a set of methods. But here’s the interesting part: Go does things differently from other languages. Instead of needing an explicit declaration, a type in Go automatically satisfies an interface as long as it has all the required methods.

Enhancing Data Access with the Decorator Pattern in Go

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Matryoshka dolls

each shell wrapping the next.

The decorator pattern lets you add behaviour to an object by wrapping it, without changing the object itself. In Go, it’s a clean way to keep things like caching, logging, or metrics out of your core logic.

Go has no classes or inheritance, so the pattern is built with interfaces: every decorator implements the same interface as the thing it wraps. Below is a small data access layer with stackable behaviours.

A Beginner's Guide to Semantic Versioning

Sun, 09 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Semantic Versioning (SemVer) is a small set of rules for choosing version numbers. Many developers find it confusing at first, especially around when to bump which number and what release candidates are for. It helps to start with the problem it solves.

Understanding Zero Values in Go

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In Go, variables of basic types such as int, float64, bool, string, and others, will have a default value that is assigned by the compiler or runtime when no value is explicitly assigned to it (they are declared but not initialized). This is called a “zero value”.

This matters because a declared variable always has a value. That value is often useful as-is, but some operations, such as assigning into a nil map, still require initialization.

Escaping the internet's walled gardens

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The Balsam Garden of Cairo

a walled garden under guard. (14th century)

The internet has changed a lot since its early days. It started as many independent networks and servers connected together, which let information, competition, and new ideas flow freely. Today, a handful of large tech companies control most of it. The result is a set of “walled gardens”, where users mostly see the content and services those companies choose to offer.

How I organize (most of) my Go microservices

Sun, 06 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When first learning Go, my initial instinct was to find a framework that would scaffold the basic folder structure and functionality that would allow me to build my first project. It didn’t take long to realize that Go, thanks to its rich standard library ecosystem, didn’t really need a framework, and often the framework works against you. Since then, I’ve welcomed many new developers to my team who were used to working with different programming languages. Some of them have been surprised by the lack of a consistent folder structure across different parts of our company’s codebase.

End-to-End tests with Venom

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Glass beaker with snake-thread decoration

Roman, Gallia Belgica, 4th century CE.

What is Venom?

Venom is an open source tool for writing automated end-to-end and integration tests, published by OVH, a French cloud company. It aims to be simple to use. Unlike many end-to-end testing tools, it doesn’t require you to write your tests in Python, Java, or JavaScript: you declare test cases in a .yaml file that looks a lot like a CI job definition. It is written in Go and easy to extend.

An introduction to Protocol Buffers 3

Sun, 09 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A little bit of context first:

I’ve spent most of my professional life building RESTful APIs. Recently I had to build a gRPC service, and learning protobuf for the first time seemed to be a daunting task. It turns out, Protocol Buffer is very easy to learn, feature-rich, and can speed up development significantly.

If you are looking into protobuf for the first time, my goal in this post is to give you an initial overview of the Protocol Buffer 3 syntax, structure, data types, and best practices.

Five useful terminal tools for Developers

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Most of my day happens in a terminal, and over the years a few tools have become part of how I work. Here are five I keep coming back to.

Chezmoi

GitHub: twpayne/chezmoi