Technology Commentary

We all take Ethernet and its ubiquitous RJ-45 connector for granted these days. But Ethernet didn’t start with twisted pair cable. [Mark] and [Ben] at The Serial Port YouTube channel are taki…

Rapidly increasing maturity of generative AI technologies, wider usage of OpenTelemetry and pressure to trim costs will shape observability in the new year.

Learn how you can apply autonomous AI systems to transform data management, operational efficiency and innovation.

We talk about Morse code, named after its inventor, Samuel Morse. However, maybe we should call it Vail code after Alfred Vail, who may be its real inventor. Haven’t heard of him? You aren&#8…

Imagine what would have happened had Martin Winterkorn not imploded, and if Volkswagen, under his watch, had not become a datakranken (data sea-monster, or octopus), spying on drivers and passenger…

Holiday season 2024 solidified it: we really need to stop going along with the lie that streaming is better than physical media.

Tool fragmentation, integration hassles, configuration nightmares: Users of IaC tools are fed up. Could help come from the emerging practice of Infrastructure from Code?

Open AI models on the rise are shaking up the AI market, breaking a stranglehold of proprietary models running on proprietary hardware.

Recently the Dutch Electoral Board (where I am also a very part time advisor) invited me to do a talk reflecting on their open source Abacus vote tabulation software. Much software is now provided as a service, and is typically deployed continuously (CD, continuous deployment), surrounded by enough automated testing (CI, continuous integration) that we can be reasonably sure that a new revision is likely to at least work to some extent.

While they are dying out, you can still find incandescent bulbs. While these were once totally common, they’ve been largely replaced by LEDs and other lighting technology. However, you still …

How to decide between the two while designing software ?

Despite the latest and greatest Intel-derived computers having multi-core 64-bit processors and unimaginably fast peripherals, at heart they all still retain a compatibility that goes back  to the …

Intel died when mobile cost it its software differentiation; if the U.S. wants a domestic foundry, then it ought to leverage the need for AI chips to make an independent Intel foundry viable.

The most popular and most important posts on Stratechery in 2024.

In this article, I engage in a conversation with ChatGPT to explore the possibility of extraterrestrial life and the pressing need to preserve our planet. We discuss the challenges of contact with other civilizations and the urgent actions required to combat climate change, pollution, and resource depletion.

Gitlab is an integrated developer productivity, infrastructure operations, and security platform. This Wardley map explores the evolution of Gitlab’s users’ needs, as one component in understanding the company’s strategy. In particular, we look at how Gitlab’s strategy of a bundled, all-in-one platform anchors on the belief that build and security tooling is moving from customization to commodity. This is an exploratory, draft chapter for a book on engineering strategy that I’m brainstorming in #eng-strategy-book. As such, some of the links go to other draft chapters, both published drafts and very early, unpublished drafts.

WayTools’ TextBlade brilliantly compressed a comfy typing experience into a pocket-sized device. Too bad it never actually reached the market.

Observability, so hot right now. Over the years, we’ve seen observability go from an unknown concept to a ubiquitous phrase that everyone is desperate to stamp...

I'm reading four books at the moment: Ethan Mollick's Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics, Robin Wall Kimmerer's Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, and Sherry Turkle's Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Each Other. I'm always juggling more than

Interactive article about the Moon

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash I recently wrote about the future of the browser and Surf, a new app from the creators of Flipboard. Both stories explore the c…

Regular expressions are wondrous, but they’re ill-suited for many tasks; parsers are often more reliable.

How Churches can help roll back the phone-based life

With all of this chatter about China looking into possible violations of antitrust law by Nvidia, and regulators in both the United States and the

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.

Analog radio broadcasts are pretty simple, right? Tune into a given frequency on the AM or FM bands, and what you hear is what you get. Or at least, that used to be the way, before smart engineers …

Recently there was a bit of a panic in the media regarding a very common item in kitchens all around the world: black plastic utensils used for flipping, scooping and otherwise handling our food wh…

These days, very few of us use optical media on the regular. If we do, it’s generally with a slot-loading console or car stereo, or an old-school tray-loader in a desktop or laptop. This has …