Barend Erasmus

This is where I share thoughts, ideas, and things I'm working on — sometimes technical, sometimes personal. Just me, writing about what matters to me.

Featured

• Why 'Just Write Better Prompts' Isn’t the Answer

  Published: 9 Nov, 2025 |  at  01:36 PM

  We like to pretend LLMs are these fuzzy, intuitive thinkers. But at the core, they’re just very large, very sophisticated pattern-matching machines built on rigid rules.

• AI Hiring Tools and the Risk of Discrimination: A Thought Experiment for Businesses

  Published: 26 Aug, 2025 |  at  04:43 PM

  An experiment shows how AI hiring tools can unintentionally discriminate, highlighting the risks, biases, and need for human oversight in recruitment.

• Why People Follow Leaders

  Published: 23 Aug, 2025 |  at  02:29 PM

  What actually makes people lean in and decide, 'Yes, I’ll go with you'?

Recent Posts

• Learning by Reimplementing Raft

  Published: 15 Oct, 2025 |  at  11:05 AM

  Back in 2016, I was working on an NCache-to-Redis migration. The catch? This wasn’t a clean, containerized world.

• The Paradox of Hiring in 2025: When Everyone’s Applying but Nobody’s the Right Fit

  Published: 9 Oct, 2025 |  at  11:43 AM

  Over the past year, I’ve been part of several engineering hiring processes — across different companies, networks, and roles.

• Where 'Vibe-Coding' Falls Apart

  Published: 1 Oct, 2025 |  at  01:22 PM

  There’s a growing trend I’ll call vibe-coding: writing code with large language models and trusting the output without much validation. It feels productive, but often falls apart the moment you need precision.

• Benchmarking JSON Parsing: JavaScript vs Go vs C++ Performance

  Published: 28 Aug, 2025 |  at  03:37 PM

  A real-world benchmark comparing JSON parsing speeds in JavaScript, Go, and C++. See how each performs on a 1.5 GB dataset and which comes out fastest.

• Real Estate vs. The Stock Market: What 7 Years Taught Me

  Published: 1 Aug, 2025 |  at  01:17 PM

  In 2016, I bought my first property. Like many people, I believed real estate was the safest way to build wealth. After all, “property always goes up,” right?

• Automating DNS Setup for DigitalOcean Droplets with Bash and Cloudflare

  Published: 21 Jul, 2025 |  at  02:03 PM

  For the past few years, I’ve used DigitalOcean for hosting small projects, experiments, and services.

• LLMs: Not Magic, Just Math (and Marketing)

  Published: 16 Jul, 2025 |  at  10:26 PM

  Take large language models (LLMs). Fundamentally, they’re just probabilistic models trained on huge datasets.

• Contain the Mess: How I Use Design Patterns to Evolve Legacy Systems

  Published: 13 Jul, 2025 |  at  12:28 PM

  One of the most consistent contributors to success in the projects I’ve led has been the strategic use of design patterns.