Technology Commentary

Today we’re excited to release Railpack — the next iteration of the Railway builder, developed from the ground up based on everything we’ve learned from building over 14 million apps with Nixpacks.

Layer Aleph: Crisis Engineering

Tom Bodett, the legendary cheap-motel pitchman, sues his primary client, Motel 6, for non-payment. What a sad way for a great ad campaign to end.

If you were alive when 2001: A Space Odyssey was in theaters, you might have thought it didn’t really go far enough. After all, in 1958, the US launched its first satellite. The first US astr…

During Apple’s late-90s struggles with profitability, it made a few overtures toward licensing its software to other computer manufacturers, while at the same time trying to modernize its operating…

Predicting the future is a dangerous occupation. Few people can claim as much success as Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science and science fiction author. Thanks to the BBC and the Australian Broadc…

Compaq’s Rod Canion broke Big Blue’s hold on the PC market—and changed computing forever

You just have to rebuild almost everything about it.

Some frustrated JavaScript developers have turned to Elixir and its Phoenix framework. They claim it has faster development and lower costs.

In the Blackberry-keyboard-based project lineage story last week, I covered how a series of open-source projects turned into Beepy, a cool Linux PDA with a lively community. To me, it’s yet a…

When home computers first appeared, disk drives were an expensive rarity. Consumers weren’t likely to be interested in punch cards or paper tape, but most people did have consumer-grade audio…

Jef Raskin instigated the Mac project in 1979. Twenty years later, he was dismayed with the state of personal computing. What would he think today?

Cheap Tickets, one of the first big digital travel companies, has a hell of a corporate history—one with nothing to do with the internet.

Asking for a cohort. How many different sellers, or one seller with different names, are (or is) pushing a coffee cup with the design above? But the problem is a U.S. one. Traffic to this blog jump…

After two decades, Apple has announced its final version of MacOS for Intel. Guess that means Hackintoshing is done, too.

Everyone these days wants to talk about Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) when it comes to nuclear power. The industry seems to have pinned its hopes for a ‘nuclear renaissance’ on the exci…

It’s easy to think of commercial products as black boxes, built with proprietary hardware that’s locked down from the factory. However, that’s not always the case. A great many co…

Simple, speedy, scalable, resilient: the fast, lightweight message broker you’re suddenly hearing a lot about has plenty of competition but stands out for its comprehensive approach to event-driven architecture

My current theory of agentic programming: people are amazing at adapting the tools they're given and totally underestimate the extent to which they do it, and the amount of skill we build doing that is an incidental consequence of how badly the tools are designed.

Tech giants come and go

Researchers at the University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science introduce a novel approach to reducing electronic waste and advancing sustainable data processing: turning old smartphones into tiny ...

I discuss why Alexa missed the opportunity to take the lead and become the dominant player in the conversational AI market.

Step-by-Step Coding Implementation of Coppersmith and Grossman's 1975 paper

Let's Understand DNS For Real

Max Mitchell's personal portfolio website showcasing his photography, YouTube videos, coding projects, and work history.

How core principles of computer science unlock resilient, scalable systems.

(continuation of a previous post) If you ever have a hit on your hands, my advice is to take notes. Living in the whirlwind of blinding success is a little like experiencing your own wedding &#8211…

What could happen when you open-source a hardware project? No, seriously. I hold a fair few radical opinions – one is that projects should be open-source to the highest extent possible. I&#82…