Laurent Le Brun

In October 2023, I decided to run a travel experiment. I had several months of free time, and I realized I was terrible at keeping in touch with people, especially after moving across multiple countries. So I created a public Google Form, posted it online, and asked a simple question: “if you want...

I previously discussed how the main codebase at Google enforces strict tooling and conventions to allow the codebase to scale. For many years, there was one glaring exception: the IDE.

Context: I worked at Google from 2011 to 2024. Some of the information might be approximative, I’ll update it...

Many software engineers I know are familiar with the demoscene, but very few follow it actively. Every year, around 2,000 productions are released. Once in a while, a masterpiece like .kkrieger or Elevated becomes famous, but most of the best work stays inside the scene.

To filter the noise, j...

In the last few days, I built a shoot ’em up game by embedding a tiny custom bytecode VM and rendering the graphics using a fullscreen pixel shader. The result is a 3kB Windows executable.

This was done for Langjam Gamejam, a 7-day challenge where you create a programming language and then use i...

Many people have learned English mainly through TV series and video games. We know that language acquisition happens when someone is exposed to a language that’s mostly understandable, with enough context, visuals, and motivation to make sense of it.

But it’s often hard to find good content in y...

An AI-generated book

A few days ago, I found a newly published book about Starlark (a language derived from Python, intended to be embedded). This caught my attention since I was responsible for Starlark during my time at Google.

I was shocked. Starlark is too niche to warrant a full book, and...