Technology Commentary

WebAssembly's structure signifies its capability to provide isolation, allowing tunneled deployments between endpoints and APIs.

Posted on Wednesday 7 Feb 2024. 1,471 words, 2 links. By Matt Webb.

An old document I surfaced with my quick tour of distributed systems theory fundamentals

I believe we are at the threshold of a new programming paradigm. As the latest advancements in AI make it more accessible and closer to a self-hosted utility, we are entering a world in which developers can articulate what they want to achieve in simple natural language terms. I call this paradigm semantic programming.

An API should be easy to learn and write to, and hard to misuse. Your API will also need to evolve, and a good design takes this into account.

Let’s talk about what makes monorepos so flexible, powerful and fun to work in day to day.

An intuition for distributed consensus in OLTP systems

The shouts of the RESTafarians in 2010 still ring loud in my head. REST wasn’t just a philosophy, it was a religion. You needed to have read Roy Fielding’s dissertation and posses a strong handle on the four levels of REST maturity, otherwise you were doing IT WRONG!!! Folks rarely demonstrated what they were talking about, and almost always shamed you when you didn’t emulate what they were talking about in your work. Maybe I am just too sensitive, but it was this dogma that pushed me to start API Evangelist to help others understand what was going on without shaming them.

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Don MacVittie asks vendors: Don’t tell us how you can control other vendors' tools; tell us how you’re making it easier to manage yours.

with Ethan Zuckerman This is a draft of a chapter from Chand’s and Ethan’s forthcoming “A Field Guide to Social Media,” coming next year on MIT Press. We’d love your feedback on what we have so far, so please share your thoughts in the comments. When we set out to write this book, centered around […]

I’m working on two kits at once: A Lego Technic Perseverance kit, and a “hello world” spoon using a beginner’s whittling kit. They could not be more different, yet I can see why both deserve to be …

When a codebase is large and complex, it's risky to big changes. Here's a structured way to approach the problem.

Strategies for Internet citizens

Last month ago I wrote a column for Wired.com, Rebooting web comments, that attracted some unsavory feedback. Had the flamers read beyond the second paragraph they might have seen that I wasn&#8217…

We need hubs that syndicate to and from personal clouds. It will do wonders not only for academic discourse, but also for the entire web, writes Jon Udell.

If I were czar of the Net (were such a thing even possible) I wouldn't require use of verified identities. Rather I'd want to ensure that everyone, identified or not, can own and control their online speech, writes Jon Udell.

Update: For a simpler formulation of the ideas in this essay, see Doug Belshaw’s Working openly on the web: a manifesto. Back in 2000, the patterns, principles, and best practices for buildin…

Today we do business the hard way, using phone calls and faxes and piles of papers on our desks, and we do it poorly. I'm hoping our personal clouds will enable us to do it easily and well.

Why don't things like syndicating health information work yet? Sure, our systems aren't ready. But neither are we, writes Jon Udell.

In a world full of services like delicious, FriendFeed, and Twitter -- services that can route feeds of data based on user-defined vocabularies -- you don't have to be a programmer to create useful mashups. You just have to understand, and find ways to apply, something Jon Udell calls the Principle of Informal Contracts. He expands on the concept in the second part of his elmcity series.

Last week I mentioned three ways for elmcity curators to categorize events: If a source iCalendar feed uses the CATEGORIES property, they’ll be included. If all of the events from a feed can …

A recent Twitter exchange reminded me of a 2005 blog post that included this Ray Ozzie quote: Each fall, as I manually enter the entire Celtics season schedule, my company’s holidays and my c…

In 2001 I was among a community of early bloggers who came together around Dave Winer’s Radio UserLand, a tool for both publishing and aggregating blogs. To the world at large, blogging was r…

As I build out calendar hubs in various cities I’ve been keeping track of major institutions that do, or don’t, provide iCalendar feeds along with their web calendars. At one point I ma…

It’s been a while since I hung up my spurs as a columnist, and lately I’ve been missing the opportunity to write regularly for a venue other than this blog. So when Mike Barton asked me…

Yesterday’s stream of notifications brought two links paired with invitations for me to comment. The first link points to a NY Times story about how AVOS, the new owner of Delicious, plans to…

Today I created a private blog site — that is, Internet-accessible but SSL-and-password-protected — and realized that there was no easy way for most people to subscribe to it. Even if t…

Yesterday I interviewed Hugh McGuire about LibriVox for next week’s ITConversations podcast. In the course of our conversation I was reminded that LibriVox catalog pages — like this one…

It’s been an interesting couple of weeks for folks who care about RESTful web services. Dare Obasanjo kicked things off with a couple of items about the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) and Goo…