TIL on Writing Developer

Constant work pattern

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:00:00 +0200

I recently came across a pattern that was new to me.

The name “constant work” says it all: you do the same amount of work regardless of the load or the failures the platform is experiencing.

Typically, you always do the work sized for the worst case, even when there’s almost nothing to do; this way, whatever happens, that part of the system is stable, reliable and predictable.

Another interesting property you might want when applying the pattern is anti-fragility: the work stays fixed, but its contents shrink as things fail.

SQLite has STRICT tables

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0200

I didn’t know that SQLite tables are dynamically typed by default. You can declare a type for a column, but the database will happily store whatever data you put in it!

Luckily, SQLite provides a STRICT option that enforces the declared type.

It works for both INSERT and UPDATE operations:

CREATE TABLE table_strict (age INTEGER) STRICT;

INSERT INTO table_strict (age) VALUES ('ciao');
-- Runtime error: cannot store TEXT value in INTEGER column table_strict.age (19)

INSERT INTO table_strict (age) VALUES (38);
UPDATE table_strict SET age = 'ciao' WHERE age = 38;
-- Runtime error: cannot store TEXT value in INTEGER column table_strict.age (19)

Thanks to Evan Hahn for the TIL!

What is an agentic harness

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 07:00:00 +0200

For a while now, posts and articles everywhere have started mentioning ‘coding harness’, ‘agentic harness’ and so on. Also the Pi home page says “There are many agent harnesses but this one is yours”.

If you’re a native speaker, this is probably trivial, but for me it was a word that I had never come across before and I had to research what it meant, especially in the software engineering context (a literal Italian translation didn’t help).

Git clone supports a --sparse option

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0200

I was deploying one of my projects on my home server and I only needed the docker-compose.yml located at the top-level of the repo, not the full code. My first solution was to copy-paste it, but then I updated the file and forgot to sync it, and it bothered me.

Surprisingly, I found out that git clone supports a sparse option that by default only checks out the top-level files! To also limit what’s downloaded, you can partial clone the repo with the option --filter=blob:none.