Technology Commentary

Last week’s ThingsCon brought lots of inspiration, among others in the talks by Matt, Iohanna, and Simone. Some first thoughts. And the tech giants battling for the hottest news.

The x-man-pages handler and a question about how I should link to man pages on the blog.

Prove you're human by playing DOOM

Istio has set a new standard for service mesh in cloud native environments, but there were a number of stumbles along the way since it was created.

I started writing this post in October, when . I got distracted by the professoring business, and didn't finish it until now. It's not quite so salient (and,...

The Warez scene, often referred to as The Scene, is an underground network of piracy groups specialized in obtaining and illegally releasing digital media before their official release date. The Scene distributes all forms of digital media, including computer games, movies, TV shows, music, and pornography. This network is meant to be hidden from the public, with the files shared only with members of the community. However, as files became commonly leaked outside the community and their popularity grew, some individuals from The Scene began leaking files and uploading them to file-hosts, torrents and EDonkey Networks.

I couldn't remember every UUID so I wrote them all down

BEESAT-1 is a 1U cubesat launched in 2009 by the Technical University of Berlin. Like all good satellites, it has redundant computers onboard, so when the first one failed in 2011, it just switched…

My world

Over-abstraction is like wrapping a simple gift in so many layers that no one can open it — including you.

Have you heard of fast paths? If not, this post is one to learn more about them.

Protect your reputation by not doing these things during programming

IDPs have been the talk of the town. But what does an IDP actually look like? Bill Doerrfeld explains.

Posted on Thursday 15 Feb 2024. 1,675 words, 12 links. By Matt Webb.

PartyKit now includes a vector database and access to an embedding model. Here’s a guide on how to use them to build a search engine.

Posted on Friday 31 May 2024. 2,785 words, 28 links. By Matt Webb.

It’s been a big year for Bluesky! Let's take a look back at everything that’s happened in the past year.

We all take Ethernet and its ubiquitous RJ-45 connector for granted these days. But Ethernet didn’t start with twisted pair cable. [Mark] and [Ben] at The Serial Port YouTube channel are taki…

Rapidly increasing maturity of generative AI technologies, wider usage of OpenTelemetry and pressure to trim costs will shape observability in the new year.

Learn how you can apply autonomous AI systems to transform data management, operational efficiency and innovation.

We talk about Morse code, named after its inventor, Samuel Morse. However, maybe we should call it Vail code after Alfred Vail, who may be its real inventor. Haven’t heard of him? You aren&#8…

Imagine what would have happened had Martin Winterkorn not imploded, and if Volkswagen, under his watch, had not become a datakranken (data sea-monster, or octopus), spying on drivers and passenger…

Holiday season 2024 solidified it: we really need to stop going along with the lie that streaming is better than physical media.

Tool fragmentation, integration hassles, configuration nightmares: Users of IaC tools are fed up. Could help come from the emerging practice of Infrastructure from Code?

Open AI models on the rise are shaking up the AI market, breaking a stranglehold of proprietary models running on proprietary hardware.

Recently the Dutch Electoral Board (where I am also a very part time advisor) invited me to do a talk reflecting on their open source Abacus vote tabulation software. Much software is now provided as a service, and is typically deployed continuously (CD, continuous deployment), surrounded by enough automated testing (CI, continuous integration) that we can be reasonably sure that a new revision is likely to at least work to some extent.