Technology Commentary

If you are an Emacs user with a keen eye, you will have noticed that in Emacs Lisp, code is data. After all, 'Lisp' is shorthand for 'List Processing'. One of E...

JSON looks like a faithful representation of JavaScript data, but JSON.stringify and JSON.parse can silently alter or discard information at system boundaries.

Why recurring cross-team meetings reveal hidden system invariants, and when coordination should move into architecture instead.

What recent data reveals about the role of managers in the age of flattening orgs.

Programming language drama ensues as tech bros oversell the end of software engineering.

Earie Salmon explains why soldering skills are only the start

The age of personalized software is here.

The file-sharing app launched 25 years ago and unleashed a wave of piracy that would shake Hollywood to its core.

Comparison of modern Lisp dialects

Government agency will use Google Cloud H4D VMs to replace HPE Cray machines

The ‘small’ web, the ‘slow’ web, or the ‘indie’ web – the non corporate, original style internet we knew and loved in the 90s and early 2000s (people just …

Multiple cyber firms agree: bots outnumber humans online, challenging advertising, analytics and security systems designed around human visitors.

We all nod along to "good code" but rarely define it. Here are the four attributes I look for, and the practices that protect each one.

Pirsig proved we recognize quality without defining it. Where quality lives, and how companies drain it from your products without a metric moving.

Somewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal, buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything. Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a processor that checked the type and bounds of every memory access in hardware, garbage-collected its own heap in silicon, […]

Laurent Le Brun's blog

Today I accidentally became the maintainer of software that was already almost three decades old: reviving a 1990s Java utility to keep the last...

Tracking my listening across 4 different apps over more than a decade

This is absurdly cool: Puter compiled Firefox to WebAssembly such that the whole browser runs in another browser. Here's my blog, running in Firefox, running in WebAssembly, running in Chrome: …

A personal perspective on AI, product quality and the growing divide between deciding what should exist and efficiently building it.

“Our lives have become dematerialized.” That phrase – from author Ian Bogost in a short piece in Wired – struck at the center of something I’ve been trying to verbaliz…

It seems ridiculous now, but when I was a cub reporter covering the tech industry, our publication had an entire beat focused on word processing – and it was one of the most sought after assi…

Last month the FT reported that OpenAI was going all in on a “super app” that combines agents and coding, a move clearly designed to compete with Anthropic, which dominates the “g…

Lately I’ve been asking myself: what might artificial intelligence be good for besides answering questions and writing code?  My answer is the latent spaces within AIs themselves will become a new medium for creativity.  I will first explain what I … Continue reading →

What the AI productivity research is actually telling us.