Zak Knill
Senior distributed systems engineer at Ably. Writing about distributed systems, realtime infrastructure, and how software actually gets built. Sometimes about phones and other things.
Recent posts
If code is cheap, intent is the currency
Apparently writing code is cheap now. So since the barrier to producing code is gone, the intent behind the code is the most important bit. Intent is the new …
A chatbot's worst enemy is page refresh
How is is possible that we’ve made incredible gains in the performance of models, but virtually no gains in the infrastructure that supports them?.
.. or …
Only use agents for tasks you already know how to do
We’ve all seen the complaints. The burden of reviewing AI ‘output’ is shifting onto project maintainers and team members. Folks can easily …
SSE sucks for transporting LLM tokens
SSE sucks I’m just going to cut to the chase here. SSE as a transport mechanism for LLM tokens is naff. It’s not that it can’t work, obviously …
So you want to build AI agent group chat?
Disclaimer, I work for Ably; so I’m intimately familiar with the tech I mention here. Opinions are my own, etc.
Open AI group chats On Nov 13th Open AI …
Patterns for building realtime features
Realtime features make apps feel modern, collaborative, and up-to-date. The features predominantly require sharing changes triggered by one user to other users, …
Phone call asymmetry
You get a phone call, but you’re away from your phone or you can’t answer it right at that moment. You call the number back and hear an automated …
Every programmer should know
Programmers should know a lot.. apparently.
Programming paradigms SSDs Time Latency Lockless concurrency AWS costs Algorithms Floating point More algorithms …
How to adopt Realtime updates in your app
…and why you really should!
What do I mean by "Realtime" Realtime is where clients of your app can find out about something the moment it …
You don't need CRDTs for collaborative experiences
You don’t need CRDTs You don’t need CRDTs for collaborative experiences.
First lets get the ‘what-about-ery’ out the way… …