Technology Commentary

A set of rules, their rationale and a short practical guide to creating useful commits.

I’ve been reading Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software, and particularly enjoyed this quote from a memo discussed in the Zero Defects chapter: You can improve the quality of your code, and if you do, the rewards for yourself and for Microsoft will be immense. The hardest part is to decide that you want to write perfect code. If I wrote that in an internal memo, I imagine the engineering team would mutiny, but software quality is certainly an interesting topic where I continue to refine my thinking.

How the JPEG file—and the lossy compression it allowed and encouraged—became the dominant way we shared digital photos on the internet.

It's hard to pay attention when your context goes out the window.

Laurent Le Brun's blog

We’re big fans of calculators, computers and vintage magazines, so when we see something at the intersection of all three we always take a look. Back in 1966, Electronics Illustrated included…

I like my integrated development environment. But sometimes my IDE does things for me, and I have no idea how it’s doing them. That's a problem.

I do a lot of useless stuff on the interwebz; Like facebooking, twittering, blogging, redditing etc… but once in a while do some really useful stuff as well E.g. trapexit.org, stackoverflow.c…

Thinking Like a Machine, Feeling Like a Human: The Psychology of Coding Success

Last week, I stumbled on a marvelous book: “Giant Brains; or, Machines That Think” by Edmund Callis Berkeley. What’s really fun about it is the way it sounds like it could be written just this year…

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.

In this article, we will discuss the various autonomous agents that are utilised in our new platform, and how they come together to provide a seamless integration experience.

Godspeed is a todo manager built for speed. 100% keyboard driven, every interaction in 50ms.

Automating information retrieval with AI-powered chatbots stops your engineers from serving as “human search engines” for colleagues.

The emergence of a conflict between Qualcomm and Arm over desktop chip dominance feels like a revival of one of the PC industry’s most important conflicts.

How the Brannock Device, a measuring tool you’ve definitely seen but don’t know the name of, made it a lot easier to figure out our shoe size.

There’s a key piece of magic in the engineering of the Internet which you rely on every single day. It happens in the TCP protocol, one of the fundamental building blocks of the Internet. TCP…

“Every line of code is written without reason, maintained out of weakness, and deleted by chance” Jean-Paul Sartre’s Programming in ANSI C.

Product-minded engineers are developers with lots of interest in the product itself. They want to understand why decisions are made, how people use the product, and love to be involved in making product decisions. They're someone who would likely make a good product manager if they ever decide to give

Computers can be understood • Choose Boring Technology • The Wrong Abstraction • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names • The Hiring Post • The Product-Minded Engineer • Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend • The Law of Leaky Abstractions • Reflections on software performance • Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods • End-to-End Arguments in System Design • Inventing on Principle

Balancing speed, simplicity, and future-proofing in feature development is a subtle art. Let's take a look at some ways to approach this!

Pretend you have a really great programming day.   You only have to attend a few meetings, have only a few off-topic conversations, don'...

I thought I'd share one of the most maniacal piles of JavaScript that I have ever written. It is monstrously awful, and does something useful and beautiful. It is a love-hate relationship without the love. I speak of course of the DNA Lounge Sign Generator. This is the page that we use at the club for printing signs in our signature style: drink special signs, reserved table signs, window pie

The advice I left for my team on my last day as an engineer at HashiCorp

Showing sources is not enough; design encounters. Some thoughts. And the latest notions from the news, a paper on AI and democracy, and more.