Technology Commentary

Hey there! I'm Nat Bennett, and you're reading Simpler Machines, a weekly letter about making software with other people. Thought I'd try something a little bit different this week for the header image – usually I use Unsplash if I use something at all, so I can get an image that

A popular architectural philosophy in the Rails space is (or was) to embrace the philosophy that "Rails is your not your application". In this post I explore how this was hard to get right in Rails - but in Phoenix it's more than easy.

Gemba (現場) is the Japanese term for "actual place," often used for the shop floor or any place where value-creating work actually occurs.

I’m finally trying to read through some Toyota-related books to get a better understanding of the lean movement. Not too long ago, I read Sheigo Shingo’s Non-Stock Production: The Shing…

NVDIA CEO Jensen Huang recently made very contraversial remarks : "Over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits...

I decided to make a time zone converter. It had seemed like an easy project, but I was horribly mistaken

Some of you know that I work in the agency business — how that translates to my technical experience is that I used to work on many highly different

A Seafaring Metaphor for Software Architects

An unfortunate reality of trying to represent continuous real numbers in a fixed space (e.g. with a limited number of bits) is that this comes with an inevitable loss of both precision and accuracy…

My Linux journey has not been all sunshine and rainbows, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. A few thoughts.

This post will give some example comparisons running Llama 2 uncensored model versus its censored model.

Discover how business leaders can use the network to balance innovation and risk.

Innovation can be a revenue driver, yet tension between innovation and risk may negatively impact an organization’s ability to innovate, according to research published by Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Securing the boot process matters more than you think.

Founder Eugen Rochko on helping Threads federate, dodging venture capital, and why he hopes Bluesky abandons its protocol

Sarah Perez: Apple Has Lost Its Confidence What’s worse is that Apple doesn’t seem to think that IAP can stand up to the competition: app developers’ websites. I don’t agree with everything in this piece but it does make me think about the objectively funny way that

Bulldozers vs Lightning Bolts

The partnership will give joint customers a CPU platform on which to run computationally intensive AI workloads.

First published June 2009. I still see folks making this mistake—”design good APIs”. Sure, fine, but what about when the APIs turn out not to be good? Or they were good but now they’re not? In addition to drawing boundaries between elements, we need to also be prepared to periodically re-draw those boundaries. I think this is difficult because re-drawing often crosses team boundaries, creating mis-aligned incentives (calling team needs the change but the called team has other priorities). I address cross-team design in the followup to

A couple of years ago I wrote a short series of posts looking at some different approaches for assessing data infrastructure. It includes this post on the Digital Public Goods standard and registry…

Something that I find missing in almost every software company is this thing that I’m not sure I’ve seen explicitly called out anywhere, but I’m going to call...

The web needs a little more weird. These sites are helping.

How will robotics develop as mild exoskeletons and become a fashion item, creating new balance and human-robotic governance? And the latest notions of the news.

Ultimately, every problem in the constantly evolving IT software stack becomes a database problem, which is why there are 418 different databases and

This time, it really is different. Wasm will succeed for various reasons — community, performance, standards and general maturity of distributed computing.