Technology Commentary

Luke Plunkett: Stop. Closing. Forums. For. Discord. Discord excels as a means of real-time communication, for people talking in the moment. What Discord is not good at, however, is being a long-term repository of information, the kind of place you can ask a question, get an answer then have that

I got a bit caught up this month, so I had to delay a couple of things, but I’ll be […]

The newest AI tools are accelerating basic research and scaring the general public. But many people are simply using them as toys.

I recently posted a blog post about a new hash table, and whenever I do something like that, I learn at least one new thing from my comments. In my last comment section Rich Geldreich talks about h…

For half a century, Geoffrey Hinton nurtured the technology at the heart of chatbots like ChatGPT. Now he worries it will cause serious harm.

I found this thread on Hacker News that was mildly depressing for reasons I can only describe as The Unbearable Cringe of Hacker News Commenters, as they discussed this tool that lets you summarize any YouTube video using GPT. The king, though is this comment, which I am quoting here

In the early 80s, my mom worked a couple shifts a month at a little small-town food co-op that smelled like nutritional mummy. She brought home

Nine easy steps to implement full-service ownership

Open source software is frequently so complex that a third-party infrastructure provider is needed to provide a decent user experience.

Developers often believe that software performance follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the running time is spent in 20% of the code. Using this model, you can write most of your code without any care for performance and focus on the narrow pieces of code that are performance sensitive. Engineers like Casey Muratori have rightly … Continue reading Hotspot performance engineering fails

Earlier this week, Google updated its Authenticator app to enable the backup and syncing of 2FA codes across devices using a Google Account. Now an...

See on O’Reilly’s website for The Engineering Executive’s Primer. In 2019, I worked with Stripe Press to publish my first book, An Elegant Puzzle, which captured many of the lessons I’d learned as an engineering manager in fast growing Silicon Valley companies. In 2021, I decided to learn the entire process of publishing myself, self publishing my second book, Staff Engineer, which synthesized the stories of a number of individuals into a framework to attaining and operating in Staff-plus engineering roles.

Promethium’s virtual data platform provides end-to-end visibility into American Tire Distributors’ supply chain.

From zero to hero:Building an Income Stream From Scratch and make money

As much as we love PostgreSQL, there is one part that is terrible and causes many headaches for people. Learn what it is and why it sucks.

Claims it's verified viability of city-scale network that would free vast resources, in Japan or elsewhere

Why Every Developer Should Learn ChatGPT and SudoLang

They can avoid writing a bunch of complex code for applying changes to multiple rows and no longer have to use multiple databases to handle ACID transactions.

An unusual type of processor from the early 2000s seemed to offer the best of all worlds—and may be the most inventive approach to the CPU ever developed.

As long as we get to Netflix and chill.

Prompt engineering is the process of training AI models to produce better outputs. In this post, we explore how it works and how it's revolutionizing AI.

Longtime Pythonista Ned Batchelder gave the first of four keynotes at PyCon's 20th-anniversary edition, PyCon 2023, which was held April 19-27 in Salt Lake City, Utah. In fact, it is still being held at the time of this writing; the sprints continue for four days after the three days of main-conference talks. Batchelder presented his thoughts on communication, how it can often go awry for technical people, and how to make it work better.

Managing passwords, keys and other sensitive information is critical for protecting data and systems —  but challenging to do across different environments, platforms and teams. Here's some guidance on choosing the right approach.

Learn how to avoid common authentication and authorization mistakes in your SaaS application.

We implemented OAuth for the 50 most popular APIs. TL;DR: It is still a mess.

Back around when Barak Obama was president of the United States, I worked as a software developer on an enterprise ‘learning management software.’ ...