E.W. Dijkstra Archive: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD 1036)

System Architecture
Lessons from building and maintaining distributed systems at scale
When your architecture grows beyond a single container, things you thought were simple can now break in a variety of ways.In this post I want to highlight different lessons I learned while developing
Reflections on Unikernels
Thoughts on Unikernels after 10 years
An Intro to DeepSeek's Distributed File System | Some blog
Personal website for some random tidbits I work on
The Forgotten Syntax of Salt and Gold: How the Merchants of Ifriqiya Coded Commerce Before Silicon
In the annals of mercantile legend, obscured by the noisy clamor of Florentine ledgers and Venetian fleets, there existed a curious enclave…
Read-Before-Write: The Secret to Safe INCR Operations
SSH Keys Don't Scale. SSH Certificates Do
Breaking down the limitations of SSH key-based authentication and showing how SSH certificates enable modern, manageable infrastructure access.
Zen and the Art of Workflow Automation
How mindfulness can improve your development workflow through automation. Transform repetitive tasks into opportunities for efficiency and craftsmanship.
Erlang’s not about lightweight processes and message passing…
An Unbiased Review of Snowflake’s Document AI | Towards Data Science
Or, how we spared a human from manually inspecting 10,000 flu shot documents.
Foundation Model for Personalized Recommendation
By Ko-Jen Hsiao, Yesu Feng and Sudarshan Lamkhede
How Netflix Accurately Attributes eBPF Flow Logs
By: Cheng Xie, Bryan Shultz, and Christine Xu
Bye-bye Three-way Handshake, and Hello to 0-RTT
But, beware of the Replay Attack
Converting Recoll indexing to multithreading
Hans Spemann - Wikipedia
Hans Driesch - Wikipedia
auxolotl.org
An alternative to the Nix ecosystem.
Old CSS, new CSS
I first got into web design/development in the late 90s, and only as I type this sentence do I realize how long ago that was. And boy, it was horrendous. I mean, being able to make stuff an
Where is my package? Tracking Status Help
Learn about USPS® package tracking statuses and find out what to do when you believe your package is late, missing, or misdelivered.
ATConf - Erin Kissane's small internet website
This post annotates a talk I gave on March 23, 2025 at the first ATmosphere Conference in Seattle, working toward thinking together about bringing vulnerable people into the center of our work and building out viable vernacular institutions and economies for new networks.
Verification-First Development
Or: why test-first development is not the same as test-driven development
Microservices Granularity Tradeoffs - Cirrus Minor
Explore service granularity tradeoffs: when to split or unite microservices: friction, QoS, scalability, and more.
Automattic Operating System
I was interviewed by Inc magazine for almost two hours where we covered a lot of great topics for entrepreneurs but almost none of it made it into the weird hit piece they published, however since …
The Ultimate Lisp Function — The Python Combinator
Pythonistas Hate This One Weird Trick
Building APIs with Static Files
APIs are really useful for pulling in data from different sources for analysis in tools like Datasette or spreadsheets. However, APIs are often hard to build and often require writing specialized servers which then need to be deployed and maintained. What if this could be as easy as deploying a static website?
ISP Column - March 2025
OSCAL - Open Security Controls Assessment Language
C+P: Combining The Usefulness Of C With The Excellence Of Prolog
In a move that will absolutely not over-excite anyone, nor lead to any heated arguments, [needleful] posits that their C Plus Prolog (C+P for short) programming language is the best possible langua…
Public Intelligence
Imagine 50 years from now a Public Intelligence that was a distributed, open-source, non-commercial artificial intelligence, operated like the internet, and available to the whole world. This public AI would be a federated system, not owned by any one entity, … Continue reading →
In S3 simplicity is table stakes
From simple object storage to sophisticated table management, builders have always shaped S3's evolution. Andy Warfield discusses why making complex systems simple remains our north star at AWS.