Technology Commentary

First published June 2009. I still see folks making this mistake—”design good APIs”. Sure, fine, but what about when the APIs turn out not to be good? Or they were good but now they’re not? In addition to drawing boundaries between elements, we need to also be prepared to periodically re-draw those boundaries. I think this is difficult because re-drawing often crosses team boundaries, creating mis-aligned incentives (calling team needs the change but the called team has other priorities). I address cross-team design in the followup to

A couple of years ago I wrote a short series of posts looking at some different approaches for assessing data infrastructure. It includes this post on the Digital Public Goods standard and registry…

Something that I find missing in almost every software company is this thing that I’m not sure I’ve seen explicitly called out anywhere, but I’m going to call...

The web needs a little more weird. These sites are helping.

How will robotics develop as mild exoskeletons and become a fashion item, creating new balance and human-robotic governance? And the latest notions of the news.

Ultimately, every problem in the constantly evolving IT software stack becomes a database problem, which is why there are 418 different databases and

This time, it really is different. Wasm will succeed for various reasons — community, performance, standards and general maturity of distributed computing.

As the market continues to mature, both founders and investors need to evolve their thinking to ensure the long-term success of open source businesses.

Back to the future: Sir Tim Berners-Lee thinks the rise of AI has made things worse than ever, but he continues to find solutions in the internet's earliest days.

Elastic is collaborating with OpenTelemetry across various areas, not solely on profiling but also on the common schema and the semantic convention.

We've asked experienced engineers to share how they would explain some tech terminology at three levels of experience - from junior developer to CTO.

I keep checking in on the Solid project. But I’m baffled by its lack of functionality. I’ve written up some of my questions.

What can AI learn from the age of vacuum tubes?

Discover the critical mistakes and lessons learned from using soft deletes in production systems. This blog post explores the complexities, data integrity issues, and alternative solutions to managing deleted data effectively.

Happy New Year!

At a fundamental level, Nvidia is rethinking the underlying software stack that helps AI generate code that humans need.

Pushing against a wall makes you stronger and does not bother the wall and is stupid

How great would it be if the solution to most errors you face were in the first place you looked? That’s what the Arch Wiki has been for me: a massive wealth of information and troubleshooting resources to help me navigate the various configuration and installation issues I’ve encountered. Some people claim Arch Linux is too difficult for new users, but for me it’s been the only distribution I’ve been able to get consistently working, and it’s all thanks to the detailed documentation and known workarounds.

The Local-First Software Movement seeks to empower users by providing them with the benefits of collaboration and connectivity while preserving privacy, security, and data autonomy. Today, we'll dive into the history of the LoFi movement, notable local-first projects, and how to get started.

With all the hype about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in recent years, I wanted to understand their underlying technology, i.e. Blockchain, better. So of…

Today we are going to build a blockchain in Elixir. We will build everything whatever a basic blockchain provides, concepts are simple and…

Learn how OTP on the Erlang VM powers the next generation of blockchain technology allowing develops to easily build reliable dApps and smart contracts on the ArcBlock framework.

Elle Imhoff presents the uses of Ecto for casting and validating blockchain transactions in her Lonestar ElixirConf presentation.

The Freakonomics host is not too worried about the iOS debacle.