Six and a half months after the first announcement, 22 betas and 2 rcs later: incus-compose is 1.0.0. Three Rewrites ended on a line I want to pick back up. “go-orb: three years of work. No users. incus-compose: two months. Several.” That stayed true. People ran it, broke it, filed issues — and the core from The Core Should Know Nothing just kept absorbing what they threw at it. New resources, new edge cases, no changes to the core itself. ...
In Three Rewrites there was a sentence I glossed over: Hooks before and after every action — logging, dry-run, error context, all without touching the core. Half a sentence. But that’s exactly where the third attempt ended up. Today I want to unpack that one line. It’s going to be longer. What a hook is A hook is a function I slip in before or after an action. ensure, delete, start, stop — every action incus-compose runs on a resource can be intercepted. Before and after. ...
I hate spaghetti code. Warzone 2100, among other things, showed me why back in 2011. C code, globals everywhere. You change one variable and three things break that seem to have nothing to do with it. You read the code and can’t tell where a decision begins and where it ends. For three years — from 2022 to 2025 — I worked on go-orb. Alone. A framework for distributed systems, meant as the successor to go-micro. Config from anywhere, service discovery, RPC, streaming, pub/sub, kvstore, metrics. Every new idea became a feature, every feature a plugin. ...