Technology Commentary

The command line utilities "less" and "more" are a pun on the aphorism "less is more."

With the complexity of building and maintaining internal developer platforms, does anyone else feel the pendulum is about to drop?

Self-hosted apps are having a moment, but people are still a little freaked out by them. Could a Flatpak-style approach to self-hosting help matters?

Does it matter if you call it platform engineering or API governance? Map out and standardize your APIs so they can be easily accessed internally and reused.

There have been multiple attempts to create a new social network that tries to mimic Twitter as a short-text-oriented real-time platform ever since Twitter (nee X) started to fray. M…

The T-800, also known as the Terminator, was like some kind of non-giving up robot guy. The robot assassin viewed the world through a tinted view with lines of code scrolling by all the while. It w…

Treading the line between philosophy and technical history, Robertson draws on his extensive technical knowledge to produce a text which is both thought-provoking and accessible to a wide range of readers.

I have found myself writing about myths and what I find to be unfounded fears about allowing companies to compete with Apple’s apps a lot recently. One of the concerns a few people brought up with my last post about competition was that even if it might make Apple’

Software cannot be shown to be stable, and so it’s safer to assume it isn’t.

Operational technology (OT) is hardware and software that detects or causes a change, through the direct monitoring and/or control of industrial equipment, assets, processes and events.

Industrial revolution didn't give us human mimics, so why should AI think like us, this computer scientist wonders

Some reasons why you might not want to remove data from the database between automated tests: speed, correctness, data growth issues and parallelism advantages

There’s been a lot of discussion around what is means to be “open” recently. I think this has largely been driven by issues and concerns around the development and deployment of L…

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.

Vint Cerf, Ester Dyson, William L. Schrader and others share their worries and hopes about AI in a wide-ranging study from Elon University.

Can Pebble make the first smartwatch for regular people?

PebbleOS 1.10 UpdateWe've released an updated firmware with a few new features and bugfixes: Fix for watch-side battery life bug for some iPhone users. (Some users were reporting that Pebble's battery life was only 1-3 days while connected to an iOS device. Battery life for these users should increase to 4-7 days) Support for 3rd party watchapps created with the Watchface SDK 'Disable Vibration' option for incoming notifications  'Disable Motion Backlight' option to turn off flick-to-backlight (both options are in Settings-Display) Haven't installed the update? On iPhone, try rebooting your phone and/or closing the Pebble app like this, then open the Pebble app again and tap the glowing red icon. On Android, use the menu button and click 'Check for FW Update'.Pebble Android App UpdateWe've also released an update to the Pebble Android app, now at version 1.7.0. Please update your app to get these new features: Watchface SDK Support Rearranged settings screen Bugfixes Please note there is still a major bug in Android 4.2.2: After 32 connect/disconnection cycles, Android OS refuses to allow Pebble to connect. The only workaround is to reboot your phone. Follow the excitement that is filing an issue with Android here: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=41110 Pebble iOS App Update...coming soonWe submitted an update to our iOS app 2 weeks ago, so iOS users may see a new update soon! This update will enable 3rd party watchface loading on iOS.Proof-of-Concept Watchface SDKOn Friday, we released the first version of Pebble's Watchface SDK. We want to be extremely clear on this: what we have released is a proof-of-concept designed to give eager developers an early chance to hack on native Pebble apps. It's not the final native watchapp SDK by any means, more of a early start :)The PoC Watchface SDK is: An extremely early prototype of our SDK, specifically for watchfaces and simple games Designed for developers who have experience working with command line and compilers Strictly C based Missing an emulator. You need a Pebble to test your code. Designed for Mac OS 10.7 and 10.8, and Ubuntu 12.10 Not optimized for entry-level developers Risky: developers can potentially brick their Pebble by purposefully going beyond the limits of the public API functions Not guaranteed to work perfectly. Apps compiled using the PoC Watchface SDK are also not guaranteed to work. Subject to change. There is a 99.9% probability that we will adjust or deprecate major portions of the API over time, requiring major code changes. Another major point: the current Pebble iOS app on the iTunes app store does not allow 3rd party apps to be installed on Pebble. It's in the iTunes approval process now (see above). This means that iOS users cannot install apps created with the PoC Watchface SDK at this time. Developers with iOS devices can install their apps using libpebble.Without further ado, here is the Pebble PoC Watchface SDKdeveloper.getpebble.comDocumentation is available here: http://developer.getpebble.com/1/welcome with example source code here: github.com/pebble/pebble-sdk-examplesShare your creations on the Watchapp Directory: http://forums.getpebble.com/categories/watchapp-directory or Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/pebbleThis is the first step for native Pebble watchapps. Expect more progress from us over time, with major changes like accelerometer support, enabling communication from a watchapp,  persistant watch-side storage and more. We welcome all feedback through our forums: http://forums.getpebble.com/categories/developer-discussion With that having been said, it's been a pretty incredible 24 hours so far. Over 2,500 people have already downloaded the SDK. Lots of activity on Reddit and the forums. These watchapps are not all ready for the prime-time, but it's an excellent sign for the future.Pebble-Pixel by jdiez17 Reddit Post, SourceStopwatch by Katharine, ThreadContributions to libpebbleDevelopers on IRC (#pebble) have been big fans of Pebble, for which we're extremely grateful. In particular, Hexxeh started a excellent project called libpebble to reimplement our Pebble Protocol as a python library. Pebble's dev team recognized that this utility had the potential for being even more useful than our internal tools. We decided to contribute to the open source project by adding support for the Lightblue Bluetooth API and yesterday hexxeh accepted our patches (yay!).Team Pebble is committed to contributing to open source projects, and releasing new developments back to the community. You can follow our OSS contributions on github.com/pebble. It's been a pretty big week for Pebble, but as you all know, our work is never finished. We've got a lot more color Pebbles to ship out, and more software to write (and bugs to fix). Normally these updates are signed off by me (Eric), but I think it's time to change that practice. The sheer amount of work that we pushed live this week is a testament of our talented team, and these updates need to reflect that. The whole team is responsible for the product that we've created. I hope you can join me in thanking the (rapidly expanding) Pebble Team: Andrew, Steve, Rahul, Brad, Nick, Sarah, Joseph, Matt, Martijn, Ryan, Paul, Ben, Philip, Asad, Melanie, Sigrid, Ali, Kareema and Kristen.If you'd like to join Team Pebble, we're currently hiring talented iOS Developers and experienced Software Engineers in Test for full-time positions in Palo Alto, CA. You can apply by sending your resume and portfolio to jobs@getpebble.comAs always, thanks for backing us and keep on Pebbling!Team Pebble

I have been coding since I was eight or nine years old. I started with drag-and-drop programming, trying to figure out how to make a game in a tool called Microsoft TouchDevelop. I recall making one or two things, but I mostly tinkered with what was made by the community; there was a vast gallery of open programs with which you could play. I was curious about how I could make something new. At my computer, I could define a game.

It might be surprising to hear the co-founder of a GraphQL company say you probably don't need it. Let me explain.

Francesco on his blog: Wishing for a Better Apple Notes It’s fair to say that Notes has received substantial updates in the last few years. […] The app is almost perfect, I can scan and edit PDFs, write or draw with the Apple Pencil, organise notes with folder and tags

How groupware gave us the first glimmers of collaboration in the online era, then became so pervasive that we don’t even think about it anymore.

Unique identifiers play a crucial role in all applications, from user authentication to resource management. While using a standard UUID will satisfy all your security concerns, there’s a lot we can improve for our users.

I recently ran across a tweet from Allen Downey saying So much of 20th century statistics was just a waste of time, computing precise answers to useless questions. He's right. I taught mathematical statistics at GSBS [1, 2] several times, and each time I taught it I became more aware of how pointless some of

Jason Snell for MacWorld: Call Apple Vision Pro a flop at your own risk Today, we are so tech-savvy as a society that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to be on the ground floor of a barely feasible product category. And yet, that’s just where we are

I’ve written more tests than just about anybody. Spent years comparing dynamic and static type systems. My life's work is to maximize correctness and minimize maintenance. All it's taught me: the single most important thing programmers can do to improve their code is to minimize branching (e.g. `if` statements). Code that executes the same set of instructions every time behaves the same way every time.

In early 2024, I hit ten years at Allegro, which also happens to be how long I’ve been working with microservices. This timespan also roughly corresponds to how long the company as a whole has been using them, so I think it’s a good time to outline the story of project Rubicon: a very ambitious gamble which completely changed how we work and what our software is like. The idea probably seemed rather extreme at the time, yet I am certain that without this change, Allegro would not be where it is today, or perhaps would not be there at all.

Consider this scenario (this may or may not have happened to me 👀) - You check out a tag to do a prod release. The release is done and all looks good on prod. Now, you start working on a bug fix that’s been bothering your team for a while.

In this article, we'll delve into the nuances of data privacy in API integrations, exploring the fundamental concepts.

The strangest hardware problem I've ever had to debug.