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2026

Last Week in Pony - August 16, 2026

Here’s how it was. Years ago, I auditioned to be the guitar player in the Heroine Sheiks. Aside from having quite possibly the best name in the history of all bands, they also had an incredible drummer who I really wanted to play with. It took a bit of chutzpah to audition because the guitar player being replaced was a NYC legend. Norman Westberg played some seriously weird and twisted and totally awesome guitar parts for the Swans and later the Heroine Sheiks.

As anyone who knows me can attest, I have chutzpah and was all over that audition. I didn’t get the job. According to John, I was the runner up and “made a hell of an impression.” Turns out I didn’t mind not getting the gig because John left a few months later. I continued to listen to the Heroine Sheiks for years. Great band. So this week, while you’re learning a bit about what’s going on with Pony, enjoy some Heroine Sheiks goodness with Norman on guitar: Mas Suicide. And maybe think about how I’m just a chutzpah machine, ready to step in for Norman and years later, stepping in for Sylvan. And now, on with the show!

  • in Runtime
  • 7 min read

Pony’s Arena Allocator

Here’s how it was. We’d been running stress tests on the TCP system in ponyc every day for a really long time. Those tests hadn’t failed in forever. There’s two ways you can look at “no tests are failing.” Either your system is rock solid or your tests aren’t covering enough of the codebase. I’d long felt that the lack of stress test failures was the result of “tests aren’t good enough.”

A few months back, I did something about that. I took the TCP stress tests that did the same thing on every run and added some “swarm testing goodness” — randomizing what they were doing and how they were being run, from run to run. A lot more code was getting exercised, and out popped a bunch of bugs.

This post is about one of those “bugs.”

Last Week in Pony - July 12, 2026

This week’s theme song is Van Morrison’s “Caravan”. It’s a banger. Turn it up. That’s enough. So you know it’s got soul. Does it tie in with anything in this issue of Last Week in Pony? I could probably invent something, but really, I just love to drop something I’ve been enjoying lately in here every week because why not? If I’m going to write all this stuff up every week, I deserve a few indulgences.

Last Week in Pony - July 5, 2026

This week’s theme song is Player’s “Baby Come Back”. People ask me sometimes how many people use Pony, whether it’s used in production. The honest answer to both is that I have no idea. We’ve never had much visibility into who’s out there. Every so often a hint comes through that someone is shipping Pony for real, and then it goes quiet again.

  • in Runtime
  • 6 min read

Improving Runtime Test Coverage

Pony’s runtime has a set of stress tests. They run in CI, each one a program that exercises the runtime over and over for an extended period of time: one passes messages between actors without a break, another opens and closes network connections again and again, sending data back and forth. The idea is that the more you push on a part of the runtime you think is bug-prone, and the longer you keep at it, the more likely you are to shake out a bug that only turns up once in a while. For the runtime, bug-prone means “susceptible to concurrency issues”. And we hammer away at those areas as much as we can. Or try to anyway. That was the idea.