Legacy port of a more popular nivenly.com post about crafting a technical presentation for events like KubeCon.

We exist in an age of limitless optionality. There are few universal social mores to check our behavior, few cultural expectations to direct our courses. No particle of personal identity can be taken for granted. No molecule of meaning may be presumed upon. Within the expansive restrictions of law, you can pretty much dress, say, […]

Eventually, the culture figures out how much time we’re supposed to spend on something. They call it the “right” amount. How long an education should take, or an RFP. How fast to …

Tim Harford has an excellent column on IP: There is a broad logic to intellectual property, then. But the specifics can be questioned. For example, just how temporary is the monopoly? F Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby in 1925 and died in 1940. The work only entered the public domain in 2021, after several […]

In the influential 2005 paper "A Box, Darkly," Michael Mateas and Nick Montfort introduced the idea of multicoding: when one text holds multiple meanings, depending on context. Examples include polyglots, programs that can run successfully in two different languages, as well as sentences that can be read in French or English. Esoteric programming has a history of explicit multicoding languages. The best known are Piet, whose programs are images, and commands are the change in color from one pixel to the next; Shakespeare, with code written as plays, and Chef, whose programs are recipes that work in the kitchen. While these early examples are provocations, their creators did not necessarily consider in great depth the aesthetics of the mapping between systems. David Morgan-Mar, who created Chef, never cooked one of his Chef recipes. However, Ian Bogost, who has taught the language to his students for fifteen years, has much to say about what recipes work well in the Chef language, and what approaches to the language yield interesting results algorithmically and culinarily. Like Oulipian constraint systems, the designer of the esolang puts forward an idea, and it's the programmers experimenting with it who exhaust its premise. Over the past ten years, a new group of multicoding esolangs have emerged that learn from these earlier pieces. Nik Hanselmann's bodyfuck uses human motion as code, to make the labor of programming physical. My languages Velato and Light Pattern embrace music and photography, building on the language Piet, but more openly embracing the open-endedness of their media as carriers of multiple meanings. Will Hicks's Esopo project is a series of poetry-based esolangs, building on the premise of Shakespeare, but using literary tools more natural to the poet's toolbox. Meanwhile, Jon Corbett's Cree#, also inspired by Piet, builds on the tradition of storytelling in Métis culture. In his writing on the subject, he shows that all programming languages are multicoding along linguistic and cultural lines. This talk will serve as an intro to the potentials of multicoding esolangs, and how meaning is made in the collaboration between the language designers and the programmers who use them.

Build the foundation for DevOps by bringing a customer-first mindset to your team.

The future is full of innovation potential with no-code and low-code systems. It will help developers as well as citizen developers who don't know any programming languages.

That is the theme of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt: Now, for the first time in my life, I feel like I am living in a science fiction serial. The break point was China’s landing of an exploratory vehicle on Mars. It’s not just the mere fact of it, as China was one of […]

I wanted to use RabbitMQ for sending the webhook notifications to the clients with exponential backoff if they fail to receive the notifications.

Canonical officially announced the release of the next iteration of its Ubuntu operating system which is the long-term support 20.04 (Focal Fossa).

Bleachbit is an open-source tool to clean disk space, browser history, cookies, shreds temporary files and directories, and discard junk from the Ubuntu system.

Are you being gaslighted? Gaslighting is sometimes obvious and sometimes confusing to recognize. Learn more about it here.

Even just looking at photos of pencils, I can still smell the sheets of mimeograph paper hot off the ditto machine.

Given recent events, the prospect of hundreds of young men meeting on Facebook, then traveling from around the country to a central U.S. location might sound like reasonable cause for alarm.

Our hypertalented data viz friends at Stamen Design are known for their interactive cartographical experiments based on open source mapping data. One of my favorite projects is their classic Waterc…

19 yrs of building impactful, award-winning visualizations and custom data viz tools. Recipient of National Interaction Design Award from the Smithsonian.

Google may be buying heavens only knows how many GPUs to run HPC and AI workloads on its eponymous public cloud, and it may have talked recently about how

When people talk about artificial intelligence and machine learning, it's often couched in optimistic terms like "predictive analytics" and "optimization". But these rosy terms often conveniently gloss over the very real ethical issues that may arise with machine learning models, particularly when human biases are unintentionally baked into machine learning systems that are used for…

In the early 1980s, Apple launched a computer with a GUI and mouse ... that wasn't the Macintosh.

Technological change this century is expected to accelerate at a rate most of us will find shocking. DevOps principles and culture are the de facto standard for innovative businesses. For DevOps to be effective, it must be paired with specialized tools, which is why continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) has become another driving force for change.…

Recently, GitHub made it such that standard username/password login would no longer function for remote logins. In place of that aging form of authentication is Secure Shell keys and access tokens. The SSH key authentication makes it possible for users to clone and work with private repositories (at least those they have access to). And…

If you've ever wondered what WebAssembly (Wasm) is and how it fits into the service mesh ecosystem, this is the article you want to read. We’ll explain what Wasm can do and set the stage by talking a bit about extensibility in Envoy Proxy. Envoy is a service (sidecar) and edge proxy (gateway) that can…

Polite corrections to factually inaccurate tweets set off an avalanche of further misinformation and toxic language.

Techdirt has just written about belated news that the FBI gained access two years ago to the Apple account of Alexandra Elbakyan, the...

Why is low code software development and business apps grow exploding?