Top all-time · #1051
David Crawshaw
Personal blog · crawshaw.io/blog · on HN as crawshawprogrammingsystemsai
David Crawshaw is a personal blog at crawshaw.io about programming, systems and ai. Since 2018, 63 different Hacker News readers have linked it 80 times, most often “One-Process Programming Notes”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (22) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link David Crawshaw's blog for posts on one-process programming with SQLite, Tailscale's vision and zero trust, and working with LLM agents and code review.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Called helpful on zero trust and agents, a great post on Tailscale's vision, and 'the best writing' on agent code review.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 22 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- One-Process Programming Notes15 people · 16 mentions · first linked 2018-08-06
- The agent principal-agent problem7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2026-05-07
- The tragedy of finalizers6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-04-04
- Software I’m thankful for (2021)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-11-26
- I Am Building a Cloud4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2026-04-22
- Fast Compilers for Fast Programs4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-04-14
- Go and SQLite: when database/sql chafes4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-04-02
- Remembering the LAN4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-01-28
- How I program with LLMs4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-01-07
- The Asymmetry of Internet Identity4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-09-29
What Hacker News says?
Tailscale is one of my favorite companies. They're clearly on to something. Here's a great post by their CTO explaining a lot of the motivation and vision behind it: https://crawshaw.io/blog/remembering-the-lan IMO the main outstanding questions/concerns are: * Is the VPN model really the way to go? If someone gets their hands on one of your Tailscale nodes, they can access every service on your tailnet, which are l…
Comment linking /blog/remembering-the-lan
on “Tailscale is pretty useful”Submitted How I program with LLMs as a story · 919 points
HN discussionHow to create a website with Go and SQLite and why that might be a good idea to start with: https://crawshaw.io/blog/one-process-programming-notes
Comment linking /blog/one-process-programming-notes
on “Ask HN: Go-to web stack today?”Submitted Software I’m thankful for (2021) as a story · 813 points
HN discussionRelated: Crawshaw's "one process programming": https://crawshaw.io/blog/one-process-programming-notes
Comment linking /blog/one-process-programming-notes
on “Why is everything so scalable?”Submitted How I program with agents as a story · 615 points
HN discussionWould love to see a blog post on building it some time, I think the last vaguely similar (but serious) rundown in this vein was “One process programming notes”. https://crawshaw.io/blog/one-process-programming-notes
Comment linking /blog/one-process-programming-notes
on “Show HN: Spider Pro – easy and cheap way to scrape the internet”Submitted Log4j: Between a rock and a hard place as a story · 553 points
HN discussionI'm new too. Found this article helpful: https://crawshaw.io/blog/programming-with-agents
Comment linking /blog/programming-with-agents
on “Kimi K2 is a state-of-the-art mixture-of-experts (MoE) language model”Submitted Remembering the LAN as a story · 192 points
HN discussionCounterpoint: > When you have a small team that write tests and a compiler that is on the boundary of interactive speed, compiler speed dominates performance. https://crawshaw.io/blog/fast-compilers
Comment linking /blog/fast-compilers
on “Rust 1.47”Submitted One-Process Programming Notes as a story · 185 points
HN discussionexe.dev | full time member of technical staff | sf bay area only competitive salary, meaningful early equity, 2 days a week in the downtown sf office come build a cloud. we are doing everything from custom hardware to custom ssh servers to our own global load balancer. very senior small high-trust team looking for someone we can rely on to get done whatever is most important in the stack for the business. some days…
Comment linking /blog/building-a-cloud
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2026)”Submitted Zero Trust Networks as a story · 165 points
HN discussionThis could be too high level, but I stumbled onto the founder's (crawshaw) website and found one of his blog posts very helpful for understanding basic fundamentals of the product (i.e. Zero Trust networks and microsegmentation) https://crawshaw.io/blog/zero-trust
Comment linking /blog/zero-trust
on “How Tailscale Works”Submitted Go 1.13: xerrors as a story · 157 points
HN discussionIf you want an even-earlier-published article to point to as well, this has been mine: https://crawshaw.io/blog/one-process-programming-notes There's also the venerable "Taco Bell Programming": http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-progra... . It all boils down to unix principles, I guess: use the most simple (but not simplistic) tools for the job.
Comment linking /blog/one-process-programming-notes
on “Store SQLite in Cloudflare Durable Objects”Submitted UTF-7: a ghost from the time before UTF-8 as a story · 149 points
HN discussionI haven't been offended by it, and I'm the founder of a company that's been around longer and is probably the closest competitor: https://www.zerotier.com/ I don't hate on people for doing similar things. If anything I am absolutely shocked it took someone this long, since to me the idea of a full mesh virtual network is how things should work, everything else is stupid and clunky, the fact that we have to bounce of…
Comment linking /blog/remembering-the-lan
on “Tailscale has reached general availability”Submitted Searching the Creative Internet as a story · 119 points
HN discussionCan you elaborate on what the app does and also prioritize your criteria? If simplicity is your main requirement you might find inspiration in this: > My focus has been on how to adapt the lessons I have learned working in teams at Google to a single programmer building small business work. There are many great engineering practices in Silicon Valley's big companies and well-capitalized VC firms, but one person does…
Comment linking /blog/one-process-programming-notes
on “Ask HN: Easiest way to build a CRUD app?”Submitted The Asymmetry of Internet Identity as a story · 83 points
HN discussion> However, contemporary applications rarely run on a single machine. They increasingly use remote procedure calls (RPC), HTTP and REST APIs, distributed key-value stores, and databases, I'm seeing an increasing trend of pushback against this norm. An early example was David Crawshaw's one-process programming notes [1]. Running the database in the same process as the application server, using SQLite, is getting more…
Comment linking /blog/one-process-programming-notes
on “Transcending Posix: The End of an Era?”Submitted Fast Compilers for Fast Programs as a story · 73 points
HN discussion[ Woops, I went into GPT-3 mode. I'm really bad at rambling concisely, and fitting the result into a couple of comfortably short paragraphs. :/ ] Thing was, Alley Cat was the only (interesting) game on the machine in question... and when I (sadly) explained what I'd done to the person who gave me the system, they responded by promptly deleting the EXE file. While a bit of a tangent, my honest thanks for helping me r…
Comment linking /blog/fast-compilers
on “I work in DOS for a day (2014)”Submitted Remembering the LAN as a story · 37 points
HN discussionI think your only problem is too-high expectations. >examples where quality far exceeds our existing best in class work I'm no expert, but what percentage of the economy needs/is best in class work? I agree running up against the limits of these models after reading the marketing material can give the impression they're "a kludge for the mediocre" and they certainly are in part that, but they're also so much more.[0…
Comment linking /blog/programming-with-llms
on “We Now Know How AI 'Thinks'–and It's Barely Thinking at All”Submitted Jsonfile: A Quick Hack for Tinkering as a story · 6 points
HN discussionReposted from original: https://crawshaw.io/blog/programming-with-llms HN discussion of original a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42617645
Comment linking /blog/programming-with-llms
on “I Program with LLMs”Submitted Fast Compilers for Fast Programs as a story · 5 points
HN discussion
