Technology Commentary

When I started my career as an engineer in the early noughties, I was very keen on developer experience (devex). So when I joined a company whose chosen language was TCL (no, really), I d…

Thoughts on a new phone keyboard from an organization that is making a convincing case we need to rethink our discussion around FOSS and self-hosting.

Home page of the Dead media Project

Developers are entropy machines

MicroOS is OpenSUSE's container-centric immutable Linux distribution. Here is how to set it up and give it a test run.

If you've ever said "soft skills" and felt weird about it, this essay is for you

How I use RSS on a daily basis

Pondering the compatibility issues and complications of a clever element of the audio CD hidden track boom: The before-album pregap.

An upcoming iteration of the Linux kernel could take a user-friendly direction: A Linux version of the Blue Screen of Death, complete with QR code.

Years ago there was a sharp divide in desktop computing between the mundane PC-type machines, and the so-called workstations which were the UNIX powerhouses of the day. A lot of familiar names prod…

Quality and productivity are not necessarily mutually exclusive One of my pet peeves is when people pit q...

On My Mind On the eve of our Independence Day, I can’t help but think of our current political challenges. It doesn’t matter which side of the political aisle you walk. After all, the reality of ou…

Thinking again about new concepts of agency in a genAI reality. And notions from last week’s news.

Jason Kottke: Walmart Is Switching to Electronic Price Tags Walmart is switching to electronic price tags that “allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds”. No one wants this!! No one wants surge pricing on ice cream and price increases on items already in your cart. The

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash Earlier this morning while reading The Wall Street Journal, I learned that Bruce Bastian, co-creator of WordPerfect, the word-processing software, had died at 76. …

There is a 1895 French short film called L'arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station in English) where a stationary camera was set up on a tripod and filmed a train, well, coming into the station. The story goes that

Apple’s App Intents slide from WWDC 2024. It’s going to be years before we can really see the impact of Apple embracing systemwide AI features via Apple Intelligence. Many of the featur…

Jason Snell on Six Colors: Preparing for the Era of Orchestrated Apps When everything is orchestrated properly, all the capabilities of all your apps are put into a big soup, and the AI system at the heart of your device can choose the right capabilities to do what you need

This blog exists on the public web, and that means you as a user have a lot of control over both how you consume my work and what you can do with it. I publish to the web, so I suppose the canonical way of reading my work is to

This post was originally triggered – and I choose that word carefully – by a recent experience on a cloud cost-optimisation project. These experiences prompted me to consider how things…

Eleventh in the News Commons series. all experience is an arch wherethro’ Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades For ever and forever when I move. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in U…

—is not this: By now we take it for granted. To live your digital life on the Internet, you need accounts. Lots of them. You need one for every website that provides a service, plus your Mac or Win…

Last month, I had the unadulterated pleasure of presenting “No Observability Without Theory” at Monitorama 2024. If you’ve never been to Monitorama, I can’t recommend it eno…

Small improvements can lead to big changes