Technology Commentary

How CommonJS became Node's module system, ESM solved modules for the browser, and why supporting both slows down the JavaScript ecosystem.

Dave Rupert recently made a bit of a stir with his post “If Web Components are so great, why am I not using them?”. I’ve been working with web components for a few years now, so I…

Just like the great majority of programming-related courses, I was introduced to programming with the...

Internal developer portals have four main parts: a software catalog, a scorecard layer, a developer self-service actions layer and a workflow automation layer.

Stephen Wolfram shares larger-than-life stories, research and projects of his friend Ed Fredkin. Plus, their debates over programming and physics.

Summary In recent years, cellular architectures have become increasingly popular for large online services as a way to increase redundancy and limit the blast radius of site failures. In pursuit of these goals, we have migrated the most critical user-facing services at Slack from a monolithic to a cell-based architecture over the last 1.5 years. …

SSD prices are insanely low right now—but manufacturers focused on bottom line have built computers designed to prevent consumers from leveraging this trend.

A good tool is not about its hype or popularity, but how well it solves your problems and fits into your ecosystem.

Why would network managers recklessly jeopardize security with unauthorized, potentially dangerous passwordless server access?

Help developers gain autonomy on AppSec by creating a better context for dealing with vulnerabilities and misconfigurations using an IDP.

We get better at coding by reading code, but code isn't designed to be studied. So let's make projects that *can* be studied.

Programming book reviews, programming tutorials,programming news, C#, Ruby, Python,C, C++, PHP, Visual Basic, Computer book reviews, computer history, programming history, joomla, theory, spreadsheets and more.

In 1984, the late sociologist Charles Perrow published the book: Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies. In this book, he proposed a theory that accidents were unavoidable in systems …

Personal Blog

Personal Blog

Personal Blog

Personal Blog

Let’s do something extremely simple: We’ve got a view controller, it has a user, the user’s got a username, and we want to show that in our navbar title. With an @ in front, because that’s what all the cool kids do these days. Simple, right? - (void)viewDidLoad { [super viewDidLoad]; self.title = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"@%@", self.user.username]; } Yep! That’s all it takes. As long as the username never changes.

There are two approaches to doing post-incident analysis: the (traditional) root cause analysis (RCA) perspective the (more recent) learning from incidents (LFI) perspective In the RCA perspective,…

sitting in my car in a Seattle parking lot. there's a knock on my window. it's an old lady, who asks me "how do we pay for parking?" ---------------------------------------- she's taking her husband to the hospital to see his doctor, but there's a massive road project that has cut off access for months, no end in sight, so she's parked a few blocks away. almost every parking lot in town removed their pay stations years ago. she has a smartphone but no idea how to handle this situation. she never would have figured it out. her words, and I don't doubt her. the lot has three signs hung up with instructions on how to pay, because every single lot in town supports one to five different competing parking lot apps. there's one sign that says you can use Park Mobile, and gives a lot ID, and then on another wall there's a sign that says you can use PayByPhone, with a different lot ID, and then there's a huge sign with a QR code that encourages you to Scan Here To Park, as if it's the official primary method for doing so. It is not, it's just another app. I've scanned these before and gotten an "Instant App." I figure this is minimal friction for this person, so I suggest she do so. she pulls up a QR Scanner app - either because she's been bamboozled into believing that's the only way to get QR support, or because her particular Android phone actually does not have it built into the camera for God knows what reason; I didn't have time to figure out which. at first she struggles to figure out how to change cameras, but this turns out to be only because she's used to every camera app opening with the front facing selected by default; it has actually selected the rear camera, so I help her get it aimed right, and it goes bleep, and then... pops up an ad. i have to stop her before she hits open on whatever sludge is trying to put itself on her device then we get a screen with 30 different elements on it describing different qualities of the QR code. the most prominent is a "Search The Web" button, which would have dumped the scanned URL into Google for some reason and produced irrelevant results; i have to direct her to tap the tiny blue link. that link opens Instant App. Google play prints a huge permissions message; I direct her to accept it. it installs a 16mb app; so what was the point of Instant here, exactly? well, that's moot anyway, because as soon as it opens, it asks for permission, and then simply installs the normal version of the app, 24mb. we get into that. it asks for the street address of the lot. I have never seen this information printed on any parking lot in my life. it suggests several "nearby" options; they are actually half a mile away. unable to figure this conundrum out even for myself, i sigh and walk her through installing Park Mobile, which I know works. i help her find the lot ID. it asks for duration. she picks two hours. it asks for payment. she gets out her CC and types in the info. proceeding to checkout, it then... selects google pay. even though she just put in a CC. she hits proceed, and i go "is that the right card?" and she double takes and goes "...no." i maybe just saved this woman from losing $30 in overdrafts. I direct her to tap the payment options field. nothing. i sigh. "I'm sorry, it looks like you have to tap that tiny pencil icon in the CORNER of the field." yep. finally she's able to select her credit card. she hits proceed. it now pops up the duration selector again. what???? why????? it's back at the default of 1 hour, and she tries to pick two again, but it just won't do it. I happen to know this UI pretty well, so I know that if parking time was actually limited to 1 hour, it wouldn't show the option at all. This is just completely glitched out. with no other options, she just picks one hour, and successfully pays. we both breathe a sigh of relief, and I advise her that if she needs more time, she should be able to just tap a button in the app to extend her parking. I really hope it actually works like I described. throughout all this we had to grant Location permissions at least three times, and each time you have to decide between three options, none of which are "Yes." the one you want is "while the app is open" but there is no way to know this, and nobody alive has ever picked either of the other options. nobody would. i have struggled to write an ending to this post three times. words genuinely fail me.

Our friend Justin Searls recently published a widely-read essay on enthusiast programmers, inter-generational conflict & what we do with this information. That seemed like a good conversation starter, so we grabbed Justin and Landon Gray to discuss. Let’s talk!

If you’re thinking of migrating to another infrastructure as code tool (and why would you, everything is great in the IaC world now, right?!) you might find yourself asking yourself

Speed and depth as core values in ‘ways of working’ in-themselves seem mutually exclusive. Collating and considering ‘all the facts’ required for making a decision takes tim…

Rob Pike, co-creator of the Go language and UTF-8, tells us why every programmer should know about the array languages. Host: Conor Hoekstra Panel: Marshall Lochbaum, Adám Brudzewsky, Stephen Taylor and Bob Therriault.

Logging etiquette is something that should naturally pop-up in any codebase that grows complex enough (hopefully before it is actually needed the most 😅🤞). When you start having too many simultaneously moving parts, crash reports and stack traces won’t always be enough to understand the underlying cause of a bug, and this is where logs will shine the brightest. If implemented correctly, they might just provide you with the missing puzzle pieces 🧩.