Technology Commentary

Learn what parts of a platform engineering strategy is the same, regardless of org size, and what things larger orgs have to pay attention to.

On To Sustainability!

The legacy can still be felt today

Apache Foundation president David Nalley on Amazon Linux 2023, Free software, and more

A look at react-beautiful-dnd through the lens of the secure software supply-chain

When you build a new software feature, make it work, improve it so people like it, then improve more, so people love it.

Extending PlantUML with new visuals

Have you ever wanted to write your own compiler? ... yes? ... of course you have! I've always wanted to have a go at writing a compiler, and with the recent release of WebAssembly, I had the perfect excuse to have a go.

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Endianness is a long-standing headache for many a computer science student, and a thorn in the side of practitioners. I have already written some about it in a different context. Today, I’d like to talk more about how to deal with endianness in programming languages and APIs, especially how to deal with it in a principled, type-safe way. Before we get to that, I want to make some preliminary clarifications about endianness, which will help inform our API design.

A collection of bad practices in HTML, copied from real websites.

I shared a bit of a reflection on what are the issues with current Apple's tooling touching on some of the points that I presented in my Swiftable 2023 talk.

Readability is more objective than you'd think.

Let’s say you are a developer, and you want to understand how a software works, so you run it. The software fetches some data from a table, which is packed by the DB engine, this passes through multiple layers of code.

This is a very brief post announcing a fascinating discovery. It appears to be possible to use the cosine similarity approach powering explore2.marginalia.nu as a substitute for the link graph in an eigenvector-based ranking algorithm (i.e. PageRank). The original PageRank algorithm can be conceptualized as a simulation of where a random visitor would end up if they randomly clicked links on websites. With this model in mind, the modification replaces the link-clicking with using explore2 for navigation.

In an agile environment, we split our work down into what we call “stories”, that are the smallest unit of value passing through a workstream. Unfortunately, we have a tendency to over-complicate story writing and making it unnecessarily hard. Done well, it can be a simple process of taking small steps, repeatedly.

My tales as a technical founder, manager, and software engineer.

Below is an excerpt from Street Coder, where Sedat Kapanoglu talks about benefits of layering in software.

Exploring the reasons why we no longer have web designers.

Why did seven-string guitars become a nu-metal staple in the late 1990s? It turns out they nearly went forgotten—until a Steve Vai fan stepped in.

In PDE theory, why are there so many theorems about series having convergent subsequences?

The barriers between dev, ops, security and QA hinder software development, but they aren’t inevitable. Learn how to tear down these walls.

Lloyd Alter: How 'Skeuomorphism' Is Making U.S. Roads More Deadly — Streetsblog USA The electric car revolution is a golden opportunity to redesign the vehicle from the ground up to make it smaller and safer. Instead, as Alissa Walker wrote in Curbed, [“]If “petro-masculinity” defined the past decade, as oversized,

If you haven't been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don't blame you. There's a lot going on right now. It's a busy time. But let's pause and take a moment to celebrate that Elon Musk destroyed Twitter. I can't possibly

You shouldn’t rely on a SaaS-based note-taking application, in my view, and if you buy something, buy it outright. Here’s why.

Patching Linux is easy. Except when you need to patch tens of thousands of servers without downtime. Here's how Meta does it.

Originally published January 2010 The other night I was having drinks in the Tower Bar of the Hotel Hafen in Hamburg (highly recommend for the view if not the service) with Henning Wolf and Arne Roock of it-agile when I casually mentioned that test-driven development was kanban for code. Arne teaches kanban but the connection wasn’t obvious to him, so I sketched my idea (see napkin above). He seemed to understand (he kept nodding, anyway), but I thought it prudent to follow up with a post to make sure I’d thought the whole thing through. Arne, this one’s for you.

For data to be valuable in troubleshooting and post-mortems, attribute names need to be consistent across every telemetry type, tool and service.