From past chats

Put one awkward concurrent test inside testing/synctest

Your Go work often touches cancellation, retries, timers, and background goroutines—the exact code that tends to acquire slow sleeps or timing-sensitive assertions. Since testing/synctest is in the standard library from Go 1.25, try converting one test that currently waits on wall-clock time. A useful first candidate is a timeout or retry test: run it in a synctest bubble, use the real time API, and assert both that an event happens after the deadline and that it does not happen before it. The follow-up question is whether the rewritten test becomes fast and deterministic enough to justify adopting the pattern elsewhere.

• Testing Time (and Other Asynchronicities)
• testing/synctest package documentation
• Go 1.25 release notes

Let Git remember a conflict you expect to resolve twice

Repeated rebases and generated-file churn can make the same merge conflict feel like pure ceremony. git rerere records the before-and-after shape of a manual resolution and can reuse it when the conflict recurs. Trial it in one repository rather than enabling it globally: turn on rerere.enabled, resolve a known recurring conflict, and inspect the proposed resolution the next time it appears before staging it. The actionable question is whether your branches actually repeat conflicts often enough for the saved effort to outweigh one more piece of Git state to understand.

• git rerere reference
• Pro Git: Rerere
• git config reference

From the front page

Use a tiny decision record to help a design emerge

When a software design becomes clear by talking it through, the conversation itself is doing useful design work. Capture that moment with a deliberately small decision record: one paragraph each for context, the chosen direction, rejected alternatives, and what evidence would cause a revisit. Draft it before the conversation is settled, so disagreement becomes visible while it is still cheap to explore; then keep the accepted record beside the code. Try this on the next choice that has two plausible answers and ask whether writing clarified the design or merely documented a conclusion already reached.

• Architecture Decision Record
• Michael Nygard’s original ADR notes
• ADR GitHub organisation and examples

Turn the old-newspaper hunt into a reusable search recipe

For a specific Melbourne event, place, or date, begin with Trove’s digitised newspapers, then use State Library Victoria’s catalogue to locate titles or issues that are not online. Record the publication, date range, search terms, and gaps in a small note as you go; that turns a one-off hunt into a repeatable request that a librarian can answer quickly. A useful experiment would be to choose one event you remember, search a narrow week in Trove, and then ask the Library specifically for the missing local title or physical issue rather than broadly asking for old papers.

• Trove: Newspapers & Gazettes
• State Library Victoria: Finding newspapers
• State Library Victoria: Victorian newspapers