Technology Commentary

By now you’re probably hearing about OpenTelemetry quite often. Maybe you’ve already read the description at…

Developer Cory LaViska built component libraries for large companies, but he saw a need for an open source Web Components library.

In reality, staff engineers aren’t about ‘company wide’ impact but a system of patronage where managers reward behaviors they value

Why not "why not" comments? Not why "not comments"

Scale AI’s future versus further scaling of language model performance. How Nvidia may take all the margins from the data market, too.

What is the definition of “Open Source”? In future posts, we’ll discuss harmonious paths forward, but for now we have to dig into why OSI’s Open Source Definition created division from the start

How GitHub _actually_ became the dominant force it is today, from one of it's cofounders.

For the last few years, I had several thousand people at my disposal. In short, I was a Warlord in the ur-Metaverse.

I’ve clipped interviews with hackers from the 1980’s from longer TV news segments, you can find the longer segments linked below as well. We are talking about primary sources here, hack…

As the community struggles to define open source AI, it battles unprecedented complexity.

Roy Fielding created REST as his doctorate dissertation. After reading it at https://ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/top.htm, I would boil it down to three basic elements: A document that d…

On the freedom that cellular modems gave to consumers—and how mobile companies tried to claw it back during the iPhone era.

Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, joins Decoder to discuss linkrot.

The difference in security defaults between Debian and Red Hat.

Master the Essential Git Commands: A Developer’s Guide to Efficient Collaboration and Version Control

Stripe, the leading online payments platform, has recently acquired Lemon Squeezy, a popular subscription management and billing platform. While this acquisition might seem like a strategic move for Stripe to expand its offerings, theres a growing concern that it might follow a similar path to Adobes infamous acquisition of Macromedia.

As technology progresses, we generally expect processing capabilities to scale up. Every year, we get more processor power, faster speeds, greater memory, and lower cost. However, we can also use i…

While version control used to be reserved for big corporate projects, it is very mainstream these days. You can attribute much of that to Git, the software that has nearly displaced other version c…

On Tuesday, my Garmin said I slept 2 minutes. One problem (or rather, the first in a series of problems with this record): it was 8am, and I get up every morning at 6. I wasn't even in bed at 8, let alone asleep. (Indeed, I think I was lacing

Something people misunderstand about "ball hogs" is that they assume they hog the ball _because_ they’re better than other players. It's the opposite! Ball hog is a personality type (and I am one of them). I want to be in control as much as possible, and as a result I spend time getting really good at what I do. Almost all of my own skill acquisition can be explained by this impulse.

One path to being more productive is to avoid searching for the information you need when starting a task. Contextual computing is a solution to this.

One of my most unexpectedly controversial posts is Extract the Kernel, which argues that executives are generally directionally correct but specifically wrong, and it’s your job to understand the overarching direction without getting distracted by the narrow errors in their idea. Some executives are skeptical of this idea because they don’t like the implication that they’re usually wrong, but they weren’t the audience that was offended. But the folks who got particularly upset were non-executives who felt it was unfair for them to have to debug the executives’ communication. The fair solution, some argued, is for the executives to become better communicators rather than requiring others around them to become better listeners. For what it’s worth, I agree with them, that would be more fair, but I’ve always found it much more productive to focus on how I can improve my approach than to document ways that others could improve theirs.

GenAI promises evolutionary changes in how we use observability tools, but meeting expectations means heeding the lessons of our AIOps mistakes.

This is how GPU data orchestration can open new possibilities while reducing administration costs and time burdens.

The risk of the open internet is that someone will exploit your well-intentioned openness thoughtlessly. That’s how the internet slowly stops being open.