Technology Commentary

Should you build your own reverse proxy to replace Nginx?

One January day in 1998, Jon Postel emailed eight of the 12 organizations that served as address books for the entire internet. He told them to reconfigure their computer servers so that they pulled addresses not from a government-backed operation in Herdon, Virginia, but from a machine at the computing facility he helped run at the University of Southern California. And they did.

Cloud native architectures are churning out more data, increasing the cost of observability. But there are better ways to manage these expenses.

Imagine you’ve been tasked to implement a sizeable new feature for the product you’re working on. That’s the opportunity you’ve been waiting for - everybody will see what a 10x developer you are! You open a list of the coolest new libraries and design patterns you’ve wanted to try out and get right into it, full “basement” mode. One week later, you victoriously emerge and present your perfect pull request!

Learning how to build quality software is not part of computer science education. How do we learn it?

Regulatory pressure is driving IT teams to invest in more efficient servers and storage and improve their data-center reporting capabilities.

If you don't understand why a particular practice is used, you risk going down the lane of "hype-driven development".

Providing useful API discovery solutions is hard. I have dedicated 15 years to understanding and trying to provide solutions to this problem. I regularly gather my thoughts on this subject and invest cycles in moving forward the solutions I feel are needed to help with API discovery. My solutions all revolve around my API discovery format—-APIs.json. As I move from the realm of API service provider to API platform governance, alongside some fresh pain around API discovery I have found new energy to invest in APIs.json, and the wider API operational discovery landscape.

Early in my career, I navigated most decisions by simple hill climbing: if it was a more prestigious opportunity and paid more, I took it. As I got further, and my personal obligations grew, I started to think about navigating a 40-year career, where a given job might value pace rather than prestige. Over the last few years, what I’ve come to appreciate is that there’s another phase: purpose. Purpose isn’t intrinsically the third phase of a career, but it certainly has been for me, as I was fixated on financial stability for most of my first decade in the industry, and then by controlling my career’s pace as we had our first child.

Enterprise Architecture as Strategy by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C Robertson is an interesting read on how integrating technology across business units shifts the company’sstrategy landscape. Written in 2006, case studies are not particularly current but the ideas remains relevant. The technology industry is simultaneously grasped by the optimism that things are changing constantly–your skills from last year are already out of date!–and the worry that nothing particularly important has changed since the 1970s when the unix epoch began.

We discuss what engineering metrics are, what function they perform, why they are important. We also discuss why Engineering teams do not usually trust them.

Senior developers have a responsibility to develop ideas to solve technical issues. Here's how this works, using what3words as an example.

Many factors come into play when considering which parts of your tech stack to modernize within the parameters of your business goals.

One of the great/weird things about iPhotos is the ‘this day today’ feature. It brings up memories, both good and not-so-good. Today, it popped up a photo of Travis Kalanick hanging out…

The electric vehicle finds itself in the middle of the big debate over the future of AM radio. Could the AM dial get pushed off to the side?

Posted on Friday 8 Dec 2023. 1,057 words, 6 links. By Matt Webb.

and your experience will vary.

Steve Willmott came to me asking what we should do with the APIs.io search engine. I don’t have much interest in developing tooling these days, but I am interested in hardening and moving forward our API discovery format APIs.json. Regardless, to really push forward APIs.json I need to push forward the concept of API discovery, and this is what APIs.io is all about. So, to help me move APIs.json forward I did a round of investment in APIs.io with Steve to see what was possible, but what was needed.

When Steve asked me what we could do with APIs.io, I knew I wanted to improve upon what APIs.io v1 was as an API search, but I also lay the groundwork for what we need to help alleviate our API discovery pain. Every time I have made an investment in API discovery over the last decade, I also find myself considering what constitutes a good API, as well as a bad API, but also effectively dealing with the change that is inevitable across the API landscape. I knew that search would be important for the new APIs.io, something I”ll write a separate post about, but I new that an APIs rating system for APIs.io would play just as an important of a role.

...and hold them accountable, and challenge them, and push them, and, and, and, and...

Joan Westenberg: The block button is the ultimate source of dopamine. Use it It's your right to choose who you interact with digitally, and you don't need a detailed explanation for your choices. Your online space, your rules. Ideally our feeds would not have replies from people actively harassing us,

A new report on CSAM shows how platform dynamics are bringing bad actors together, years after a similar scandal unfolded at YouTube

A 14-year-old’s removal from YouTube illustrates the work platforms need to do as the world becomes more polarized. Meanwhile, the internet remains a dangerous place for isolated teens to be

I took a break after the Meta in Myanmar posts, partly because I was crispy and partly because of heavy family weather. Then, wonderfully, we got a

When I joined Yahoo, one of the biggest adjustments I had to make was to their use of “Web Services”. There, that phrase means any kind of machine-to-machine communication using HTTP; SOAP isn’t assumed (or preferred).

You just gotta read this article. Wonderful stuff in here. Normally I would simply link to the URL, but in all their wisdom, Linux Journal wants everyone to create an account before they can read this essay. WTF?!?!? Never mind that Doc Searls' thesis is about individual people helping individual people - and that this ...

Earlier this week I attended an off-the-record meeting (i.e., no blogging about the details of who was there and exactly what was said by whom) with a group of executives from various news and media organizations to discuss the future...