The open source paradox - antirez
"The best programs are the ones written when the programmer is supposed to be working on something else." - Melinda Varian.
Board
Jean G3nie
o change this by creating a version
of std that is freestanding from libc. They have mostly come to nothing because
there hasn't been enough community interest to sustain a project of that magnitude.
I find this kind of sad. I also want
Why You Believe The Things You Do
I remember reading an article years ago about a father in Yemen who lost a son to starvation, only to…
Focusing on developers
Developers face an onslaught of marketing and an unrelenting velocity of releases to keep up with. This is why we started Console.
Fostering a culture that values stability and reliability
There’s an idea which encounters a bizarre level of resistance from the broader
software community: that software can be completed. This resistance manifests in
several forms, perhaps the most common being the notion that a git repository
which doesn’t receive many commits is abandoned or less worthwhile. For my part,
I consider software that aims to be completed to be more worthwhile most of
the time.
[Public] Founding Product Engineer
Arcjet is a tier-1 VC backed startup hiring several founding engineers to help build the future of developer security in the age of the developer.
goal is to make their lives easier and earn their trust by solving their security problems without forcing them to conform to "the security way." To achieve this, we need to meet developers where they are: in code, in their preferred editors, through self-service options, and directly integrated with their frameworks.
If you’ve deployed code in seconds to Vercel or Netlify, launched containers around the world with Fly.io, branched your database in Planetscale, easily created your own private network with Tailscale, or optimized your workflow with Raycast, you’ll know the kind of experience we’re aiming for.
Google Search's Death by a Thousand Cuts
Reddit communities are still private in protest of new API rules. Twitter moved beyond a login wall and is rate-limiting users. Users are frustrated but still using these sites. But — what will happen to the Google Index? Millions of search results are effectively dead links. Users that refined Reddit search results via Google are now out of luck (Reddit’s search is inferior). Tweets in the search engine results page (SERP) now lead to a login wall for many users.
Career Ladders for Tech, Open Sourced
A sample of career ladders Sarah Drasner uses for her organization, open sourced for anyone.
Elite UK schools land in India, get schooled in local realities
Legacy British schools are learning to reconcile their illustrious legacy with fussy Indian parents and strict state laws
rundeck/rundeck: Enable Self-Service Operations: Give specific users access to your existing tools, services, and scripts
Enable Self-Service Operations: Give specific users access to your existing tools, services, and scripts - rundeck/rundeck: Enable Self-Service Operations: Give specific users access to your existi...
The Circular Startup Economy
At the height of the dot com bubble, Yahoo was printing money from selling ads. Enticed by Yahoo’s success, more money was invested in startups. These startups, in turn, bought ads on Yahoo. Many of these startups failed when the bubble burst, and Yahoo’s market capitalization dropped dramatically.
We Raised A Bunch Of Money
News, tips, and tricks from the team at Fly.
Monopolizing Useless Resources
Oil was found in Lima, Ohio, in 1885. It was one of the most productive oil regions by 1886. Except the oil was “heavy” — thick and sulfurous. It smelled so bad that not only did people refuse to use it to light kerosene lamps, but some cities outlawed its transportation. It was practically unusable. John D. Rockefeller started to buy up the sulfurous Lima oilfields. He bought so many barrels that the board of directors protested until Rockefeller agreed to put up millions of his own capital to finance it.
Personal Lessons From LLMs
The brain metaphor for neural networks has always been a fun simplification but not a useful one under closer inspection. How we train and inference deep networks doesn’t have much to do with how the human brain works. But what if LLMs could teach us more about ways that we approach general reasoning and languages? Some personal lessons I’ve learned (or have been reinforced) from working with LLMs.
Magic Mushrooms. LSD. Ketamine. The Drugs That Power Silicon Valley. - WSJ
Platform Engineering vs. DevOps
There aren’t many agreed-upon definitions, but I’ll attempt a simple distinction: IT covers physical provisioning and maintenance. Data center management, on-premise appliances, and technical support. DevOps covers virtual provisioning and maintenance.
Speed x AI
It's always been true that speed is the #1 advantage of an early-stage startup. But now that generative AI here, you need to go 10x faster.
👩🎨 Being "rockstars": when software was a talents/creatives industry 🎭
I offer a high-level model for why software work feels like it sucks now: we don't treat software like creative output.
A peek into Japan's Convenience Stores (Part 2)
Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part article. It will mostly make sense even without reading Part 1, but you would be missing out on a lot of context! Before we start, let's take a quick detour to talk about that word in the heading below. Japanese
A peek into Japan's Convenience Stores
Editor’s note: Due to the sheer amount of interesting material here we decided to break this into a two-part article. All across Japan, one sight remains ubiquitous – the convenience store. A far, far cry from their American cousins, convenience stores in Japan are without exception, spotless, well-stocked, open 24x7,
Let's make PostgreSQL multi-threaded [LWN.net]
PostgreSQL reconsiders its process-based model [LWN.net]
In the fast-moving open-source world, programs can come and go quickly; a tool that has many users today can easily be eclipsed by something better next week. Even in this environment, though, some programs endure for a long time. As an example, consider the PostgreSQL database system, which traces its history back to 1986. Making fundamental changes to a large code base with that much history is never an easy task. As fundamental changes go, moving PostgreSQL away from its process-oriented model is not a small one, but it is one that the project is considering seriously.
, particularly on bigger machines. The overhead of
cross-process context switches is inherently higher than switching
between threads in the same process - and my suspicion is that that
overhead will continue to increase.
He also pointed out that the process model imposes costs on development,
forcing the project to maintain a lot of duplicated code, including several
memory-management mechanisms that would be unneeded in a single address
space. In a
later message he also added that it would be possible to share state
more efficiently between threads, since they all run within the same
address space
A gambler's guide to giving talks
A bewildered audience is better than a bored one.
Breaking the inertia of mediocrity
It's rarely the terrible decisions, processes, or even people that'll sink your organization. It's the accumulation and inertia of the mediocre ones. Dealing with the truly bad is easy. It's painfully obvious to all that change is required. The danger is imminent. It's much harder to find the will to act when the danger lurks in inadeq...
Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life. Make the hard choices. Even when it's possible to punt. The inertia of mediocrity will not break unless you break it.
Merge Queues
A CI workflow starts when a developer pushes a proposed change (pull request, changeset, patch, etc.). The code goes through a cycle of reviews and testing until it passes automated and manual (i.e., review) tests. Then it gets merged into the main branch.
Unforced Errors
More startups die of indigestion than starvation — Bill Hewlett In tennis, unforced errors are shots that should have been easy to return but were missed nonetheless. They aren’t attributed to an opponent's strength but are the result of our mistakes. Unforced errors are subtle mistakes that compound over time.
Vertical Operating Systems: One System of Record to Rule Them All | Andreessen Horowitz
A vertical operating system possesses the same qualities as a system of record, but with a few key additions that make it a “premium” system of record.
We have left the cloud
Since it took us years to get into the cloud in the first place, I originally imagined it would take us years to get out as well. But all that work to containerize our applications and prepare them for the cloud actually turned out to make it relatively easy to exit. And now, after six months of effort, it's done. We're out. The last a...
Why First Mover Advantage is Overrated
First movers rarely win markets in technology. Ramp is a real competitor to Brex. DoorDash was founded years after GrubHub, Seamless, and Postmates. We use Excel instead of Lotus (or Visicalc). Facebook beat Myspace (and Instagram "beat" Facebook). When Google was founded in 1998, there were at least 20 other venture funded search engines. Google wasn't even the first to do pay-per-click advertising on its search engine either (that was Goto.com). Why is fast following so effective? Fast follo
First movers painstakingly discover product market fit – through costly experiments that generate technical and organizational debt. The vast majority of these learnings are observable by potential competitors: APIs can be copied, discovered markets can be entered, and marketing can be emulated.
Why is fast following so effective? Fast followers can short-circuit the learning curve that the first mover took so long to discover.
So you want to write a GUI framework
Through several recent discussions of GUI programming in Rust,I have been left with the impression that the term ‘GUI’ means significantlydifferent things to...