Some projects seem too good to be true until you dig into it and find the secret magic that makes it all work. Take Paper Tunes by [Makestreame], a project which purports to store a song on a singl…

A friend from my old hackerspace was in grad school for electrical engineering. He had a professor who would ask, when something went wrong with a student project, “Have you fully characterized the…

There are plenty of stories about inventors who see a problem and decide they can do better. But Van Phillips had a little more motivation than most. The problem was his own leg. In 1976, Phillips …

When we think about security threats, we generally imagine them coming from far away across the wider internet. But what if the connection between you and your ISP was the target? [Rithwik Jayasimh…

One of the great things of Linux as an ecosystem is that there is so much choice. Yet this is also its greatest weakness, as unlike on MacOS and Windows this means that simple questions often do no…

As far as desktop microcomputers for mere mortals went in the first half of the 1980s, there was a sharp distinction between home computers such as the many 8-bit machines we regularly see here, an…

However you make a digital computer, you need something to represent a binary digit. Usually this is some form of switch: a relay, a tube, or a transistor, although there have been other ways to re…

You’ve almost certainly heard of the Xerox Alto, the machine that pioneered the desktop-mouse-keyboard interface and inspired Steve Jobs to produce the Apple Lisa and Macintosh computers. It …

Arcade machines have a rich history, at times at the forefront of technology, and often the most bizarre machines. Machines that delivere...

There was a particular treat at the recent Electromagnetic Field event in the UK, as [Tim Hunkin] delivered a talk on the history of arcade machines. Given that he’s something of an engineeri…

[Mansour] presents an interesting idea in his essay A Common Thread — just as USB-C has become the “One Connector To Rule Them All” in the world of electronics, so too should his …

If you used a serious computer pre-IBM PC, there was a fair chance its operating system was CP/M. CP/M was a staple among 8080 and Z80 computers and while there were other versions, we’ll alw…

The last year or two has seen relatively affordable multi-material printers hit the market, and the question that [Tom Nardi] and I were kicking around when he was writing up the 2025 year-in-revie…

A talk from the recent Electromagnetic Field event in the UK caught our eye, in which [Amy Jeskins] looked at the overlooked engineering skill of pattern cutting. She takes us through the mechanics…

Back in the late 90s when absolutely everybody knew that Java was going to become the one programming language to rule them all, the Java Ring was handed out to folks at Java developer conferences …

In the old days, you either swore by BASIC or you swore at it — but just about everybody got their start on the educational language. Nowadays, the kids are learning Python, but there’s…

AI makes it cheap to build software for exactly one person's workflow. The idea is twenty years old, but suddenly feasible. And it breaks an assumption at the heart of open source collaboration.

A new job title for experts who ship systems by directing systems, agents, and outcomes

AI coding teams need small change briefs, native engineering artifacts, and enough judgment to stop Markdown specifications becoming a second codebase.

Security speed, infrastructure constraints, and why human judgment grows more important as AI starts to act

The following article originally appeared on Addy Osmani’s blog site and is being republished here with the author’s permission.Technical debt lives in

Drew Breunig is one of the smartest voices writing about AI today. He's the CEO and co-founder of cmpnd.ai, and a long-time hacker with a depth of experience

Screen readers suffer as nearly 90% of top websites tested contain HTML spec violations

You have to understand architecture in order to teach agents about it

Anthropic's head of product explains why eval suites replaced PRDs, how coding became a strategic priority, and what small teams can unlock at the AI frontier.

Since it took us years to get into the cloud in the first place, I originally imagined it would take us years to get out as well. But all that work to containerize our applications and prepare them for the cloud actually turned out to make it relatively easy to exit. And now, after six months of effort, it's done. We're out. The last a...

Hey guess what? My employer of 15 years (and my company of 18 months) is joining forces with the worker-owned cooperative, Igalia! To be honest, I’m going to miss working at and on Bocoup. There are very few1 institutions to which I’ve belonged for so long. This one’s given me many unforgettable memories, and while most are positive, they’re all important to me. For better and for worse, Bocoup has been a part of who I am for all these years.