Technology Commentary

Every few years, it seems, we’re reminded of the incredible number of dependencies built into the software we all rely on. Remember kik? Or Chef Sugar? Or any number of similar situations? The xkcd…

This post announces Chapel 2.0, including a brief tour of what the language is capable of.

Updates April 7th, 2024 I received an email from Marc Rochkind. He recounts some details of the creation of SCCS. I attached the email at the end of the article and made corrections inside the article. Most importantly, check out Marc’s original paper. Thank you all for the kind comments and interesting discussion Hacker News and Lobste.rs. HN Thread and lobste.rs thread. A History of Source Control Systems: SCCS and RCS Source Control Management (SCM) Systems, have a long and rich history.

Testing is almost universal in software development, yet it’s common to treat it like a chore, or an after thought. Sure, test-driven development (TDD) is a means to influence what the public interface should look like by having the developer pretend the class already exists, and then implementing it to make the tests pass… but how often is TDD applied? And how often is it applied consistently? What’s the magic test-coverage percentage that you (or your lead) are satisfied with, and why that number, in particular? What the heck is “shifting left”, and how religiously shoud you stick to the test pyramid? Can automated testing happen in production?

or How a Rebellious Youth Briefly Conquered the World

Maybe best known as the company which brought a splash of color to corporate and scientific computing with its Indigo range of computer systems, Silicon Graphics Inc. (later SGI) burst onto the mar…

AI that mimics how humans approach troubleshooting can democratize and improve how people identify and fix Kubernetes issues.

As Generative AI apps move toward production, the stage is set for companies to start seeing real, consumption-based gains contributing to their bottom lines.

Unexpected license changes, rotating sponsors for projects and shrinking numbers of maintainers roil the open source world. Balance risks in choosing tools.

While Flux lost Weaveworks-employed Flux contributors, most of them continue their work on the project and it continues to have a significant and active contributor and user base.

A Web Developer's secret weapon

In a previous edition of this magazine, we argued that English was so pervasive in our industry, nobody even questioned its use anymore. The same can be said of Git. It is difficult to imagine that merely twenty years ago, the landscape of source control tools was more diverse, and the choice of one such tool was much more complicated than today. Actually, Git was not even on the map yet. Before debating whether the hegemony of Git is good or bad, let us go back in time for a little while.

"Were 'In the Penal Colony' to be written today, Kafka could only be speaking of an exercise machine. Instead of the sentence to be tattooed on its victims, the machine would inscribe lines of numbers. So many calories, so many miles, so many watts, so many laps." So begins Mark

By becoming the official custodian of an entire nation’s history for the first time, the Internet Archive is expanding its already outsize role in preserving the digital world for posterity.

"Reclaim Your Brain" acknowledges "the effect that the news cycle is having on us psychologically."

Algorithms feed content, not creativity. How the campaign for clicks has drowned true artistry amidst the noise!

Apr 07, 2024 — Topic: personal Note: This is not prescriptive advice. It is not meant to be read as: "How to land a job at Microsoft." It simply cover…

Can Google find solutions to the two challenges it has in the AI driven future? The transition it faces is hard, but necessary.

I was reading the most recent Club MacSrories and this paragraph got me thinking… The reasons why Apple is so hesitant to compete more directly with a broader segment of the videogame industry are as much a mystery today as ever. However, the rise of handheld gaming on Linux- and

Free and open source software has become a modern commons, but now it's vulnerable. Freedom isn't sufficient to secure it for the future.

Blitzscaling, by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh, shares the secret to starting and scaling massively valuable companies.

Blitzscaling promises to teach techniques that are “the lightning fast path to building massively valuable companies.” But it's not a recipe for success—it's survivorship bias masquerading as a strategy.

There are good reasons to believe that – left to itself – the market for foundation models trends towards consolidation, says Max von Thun.

How Silicon Valley’s Race for Monopoly Inhibits Product-Market Fit

Dangers of DISTINCT and implicit assumptions in SQL queries