Technology Commentary

From jealous spouses to paranoid bosses, 19th-century pedometers quantified suspicion and reshaped the dynamics of surveillance.

Neatnik Notes

BLUF: 10x engineers find the biggest fires, and execute on extreme straight-line solutions, often stepping on toes in the process

Even Microsoft's lead architect misunderstood the failure

From GitHub Copilot to ChatGPT to Claude Artifacts, how Val Town borrowed the best of all the code generation tools

What makes software maintainable and easy to evolve? Austin Story shares his approach to simplifying systems, migrating architectures, and fostering a culture of intentional development.

Try building software using basic tools only to declutter your developer toolbox and learn which tools are worth using.

Last week’s ThingsCon brought lots of inspiration, among others in the talks by Matt, Iohanna, and Simone. Some first thoughts. And the tech giants battling for the hottest news.

The x-man-pages handler and a question about how I should link to man pages on the blog.

Prove you're human by playing DOOM

Istio has set a new standard for service mesh in cloud native environments, but there were a number of stumbles along the way since it was created.

I started writing this post in October, when . I got distracted by the professoring business, and didn't finish it until now. It's not quite so salient (and,...

The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is an underground network of piracy groups specialized in obtaining and illegally releasing digital media before their official release date. The Scene distributes all forms of digital media, including computer games, movies, TV shows, music, and pornography. This network is meant to be hidden from the public, with the files shared only with members of the community. However, as files became commonly leaked outside the community and their popularity grew, some individuals from The Scene began leaking files and uploading them to file-hosts, torrents and EDonkey Networks.

I couldn't remember every UUID so I wrote them all down

BEESAT-1 is a 1U cubesat launched in 2009 by the Technical University of Berlin. Like all good satellites, it has redundant computers onboard, so when the first one failed in 2011, it just switched…

My world

Over-abstraction is like wrapping a simple gift in so many layers that no one can open it — including you.

Have you heard of fast paths? If not, this post is one to learn more about them.

Protect your reputation by not doing these things during programming

IDPs have been the talk of the town. But what does an IDP actually look like? Bill Doerrfeld explains.

Posted on Thursday 15 Feb 2024. 1,675 words, 12 links. By Matt Webb.

PartyKit now includes a vector database and access to an embedding model. Here’s a guide on how to use them to build a search engine.

Posted on Friday 31 May 2024. 2,785 words, 28 links. By Matt Webb.

It’s been a big year for Bluesky! Let's take a look back at everything that’s happened in the past year.