— Field notes

Notes from the team.

Engineering deep-dives, release notes, and stories from people moving JSON at the size you don't talk about at parties.

FEATURED Engineering · 14 min read

How we parse JSON at 2 GB/s — the boring tricks that matter.

Branchless structural detection, SIMD masks, two-stage validation, and a tape that fits in cache. None of it is novel on its own; the win is in stacking five "mehs" until they multiply.

BY ANIKA RAO · MAY 2, 2026
Engineering · 9 min

How to open a large JSON file (when your editor gives up).

Why VS Code chokes, what jq is good at, and the tiered playbook for opening a multi-gigabyte JSON file without watching your fan spin for an hour.

MAY 12, 2026
Benchmark · 11 min

JSONBolt vs Dadroit vs JSON Crack vs JSON Hero.

An opinionated JSON viewer comparison from the team that ships one of the four. Real tests on 100 MB, 2 GB, search and CSV export. We'd rather you pick the right tool than the loudest one.

MAY 12, 2026
Engineering · 10 min

jq alternatives for massive JSON files.

Five tools — jaq, jet, gron, fx, jb — on the same 5 GB ndjson. Where jq runs out of road, and when it's still the right call.

MAY 12, 2026
Engineering · 9 min

Feeding large JSON to an LLM without blowing the context window.

JSON is verbose, LLMs charge by the token. From 487 MB raw to 18 k tokens and five cents — the boring compaction stack that gets you there.

MAY 12, 2026
Engineering · 9 min

Tailing NDJSON / JSONL log files in real time.

tail -f works for syslog and breaks the moment a line is JSON. Five tools for the on-call engineer who still wants to read what's happening.

MAY 12, 2026
Engineering · 9 min

JSON to CSV from a large file.

Pandas won't fit it. Excel won't either. Stream a subtree out by JSONPath, project the columns, filter at the parser. The Pandas-can't-fit-it playbook.

MAY 12, 2026
Story · 7 min

Why we built a JSON viewer in 2026.

Every editor has a JSON mode. None of them open the file we needed to look at. So we wrote one — for the file your editor refused.

APR 18, 2026
Release · 4 min

jsonbolt 1.4 — Apple Silicon native, half the RAM.

Native ARM build for M-series. Minimap. JSONPath autocomplete. And a memory regression we caught the hard way.

MAY 7, 2026
Engineering · 14 min

The boring tricks behind 2 GB/s.

Branchless tape, structural masks, two-stage validation, mmap'd indices. The unglamorous stack that adds up to a half-second gigabyte.

MAY 2, 2026

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