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“It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” That’s the first sentence of C. Northcote Parkinson’s essay in The Economist, November 1955, better known as Parkinson’s law. His example is an “elderly lady of leisure” who spends a whole day sending one postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis, a job a busy man would finish in three minutes. Fun fact: that sentence isn’t even the law. The rest of the essay is about why government offices keep growing, with rules like “Officials make work for each other.” I never needed an official. I made work for myself just fine. ...

Note This post was originally published on Internals for Interns on 2026-10-05, as a guest post in Jesús Espino’s series on Go internals. This is a mirror on my personal blog. If you want to share it, please link the original post. Today we’re going to take a look at the Go toolchain, and more specifically at how we can take part in the compilation process with our own code. We won’t patch the compiler. We’ll stand right next to it while it works, watch what it does, and every now and then hand it something it didn’t ask for. Think of it as photobombing the compiler, politely. 📸 ...

Six hours. I had planned to spend thirty minutes on a proof-of-concept. Engineers overrun estimates all the time. But this wasn’t a planning failure, it was something I’d spent my whole adult life recognizing too late: hyperfocus. The kind where time doesn’t slow down, it simply stops existing. My coffee went cold. I missed lunch. I blew past my 6pm hard stop with more working code than I’d shipped in the previous three days combined. ...

At 9:14 a.m. on a Wednesday, I open the laptop. The daily briefing for today is already there. Above the fold: a Whoop recovery score of 62 (fine), a Wakatime row showing 4h 21m on the OpenTelemetry Go compile-time instrumentation repo yesterday, three GitHub PRs waiting on review, and a Things 3 task that has been sliding forward for nine days: Review that thing from X. Each previous day the task migrated, and the journal entry from that day is one click away. The reason it kept slipping is in those entries somewhere. ...

Jonathan Hall and Shay Nehmad had me on Cup o’ Go for episode 167, straight after their GopherCon US recap. We spent about forty minutes on instrumentation: what an APM tool is actually measuring, and the three ways you can get telemetry out of a Go program without asking every team to rewrite their handlers. The part I enjoyed arguing about most was blast radius. Manual instrumentation is precise and tedious, and it never finishes. eBPF buys you one agent covering every language on the box, at the cost of running code in the kernel, where a bad program can take the whole host down with it. Compile-time instrumentation rewrites the syntax tree behind go build through the -toolexec hook, which keeps failures scoped to one service and works anywhere Go compiles. People love this dark magic, which I find either reassuring or alarming depending on the day. ...