Frew Schmidt
blog.afoolishmanifesto.com · Personal blog · on HN since 2009
Frew Schmidt writes about Perl, Go, Unix tooling, AWS debugging, and plain-text workflows from a working engineer's perspective.
What HN saysHN links it for practical how-tos, like Go and Zig cross-compilation, MS ODBC driver setup on Debian, and doing passwords right with DBIx::Class.
21HN people shared it
5linked it in comments
36stories submitted
364story points
12 months agolast shared
2009people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Detecting who used the EC2 metadata server with BCC4 people · 8 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 2A Love Letter to Plain Text1 people · 126 points · first shared 2018 · 37 comments on HN
- 3Some Code I Deleted1 people · 91 points · first shared 2018 · 21 comments on HN
- 4Using Git Grep1 people · 48 points · first shared 2014 · 18 comments on HN
- 5Investigation: Why is SQS so slow?1 people · 19 points · first shared 2017 · 9 comments on HN
- 6Exponential Backoff in Service Startup1 people · 9 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 7PerlCritic in your browser (for a team)1 people · 9 points · first shared 2009 · discussion on HN
- 8Writing a Go Linter1 people · 5 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 9C, Golang, Perl, and Unix1 people · 5 points · first shared 2018 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Centralized known_hosts for ssh1 people · 4 points · first shared 2018 · 1 comments on HN
- 11Python: Taking the Good with the Bad1 people · 4 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 12GopherCon 2018 notes1 people · 3 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 13Testing Perl Clients and Go Servers1 people · 3 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 14OSS Infrastructure Is Not Solved1 people · 3 points · first shared 2016 · discussion on HN
- 15A Custom Supervisor to Solve Weird Problems1 people · 2 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
tamnd · 2025-11-17
My use cases similar to this https://blog.afoolishmanifesto.com/posts/golang-zig-cross-compilation/
need to bundle a lot of C libraries, some using dynamic linking and some using static linking, and I need to deploy them on different operating systems, including some that are difficult to work with like RHEL. Right now the builds are slow because I use a separate Dockerfile for each platform and then copy the binary back to the host. With Zig CC I could build binaries for different platforms and architectures without using Docker.
JdeBP · 2020-05-17
mst · 2017-03-26
ODBC+FreeTDS is not generally a good idea. Microsoft's ODBC driver works fine though.
https://blog.afoolishmanifesto.com/posts/install-and-configure-the-ms-… explains how to get it going on debian.
eCa · 2016-02-18
And with DBIx::Class it is almost easier to do it right[1] than wrong.
[1] https://blog.afoolishmanifesto.com/posts/do-passwords-right/
esaym · 2017-10-09
Well the problem is, if you don't use an ORM, you'll invent one yourself...only poorly. And new hires will end up taking a ton of time to learn this "custom" orm framework of yours.
And there are many bad, or simply, "too simple" ORMs out there that really don't help you much. I haven't really found one better than Perl's DBIx::Class (though outside of Java, Python, Ruby, I have haven't really looked).
Case in point, I recently found this little gem[0] allowing easy correlated subqueries. I basically took a webpage that was loading in over 2 minutes, and reduced it to about 100ms and the outputted SQL was about 2 pages long (from about half a page of custom resultset orm code). I used several correlated subqueries to sort of pivot part of a table (well several tables actually). The original author of the code I was working on was fetching entire tables of data, with each row fetching (joining) to another entire table (it did this in several levels really) just to sum some values. This was all valid ORM code (even with handy 'if' statements checking every row id to do in ORM join (yes he didn't even use a dang where clause!)) but it showed a true lack of knowledge of the ORM at hand and even SQL in general. Nonetheless, I saved the day :)
[0] https://blog.afoolishmanifesto.com/posts/introducing-dbix-class-helper…