Explore the remarkable history of the PDF. This ubiquitous format, which has shaped the way we share and view documents, has a story as compelling as its widespread use. Discover why the PDF, often criticized yet universally used, continues to be a vital part of our digital world in 2023.
(Photo by Michael Dziedzic on Unsplash) The validation problem At some point, every developer writing user-facing code has asked themselves the question “How should I validate input?”
Code is read more than written, code is run more than read. I think this line of thought can be extended beyond code-writing, and used as a rule of thumb to identify problems and make decisions.
Once upon a time when I was a fledgling Linux systems administrator, the distribution you used Really Mattered. You used Gentoo or similar if you didn't
Thinking in Systems: A Sociotechnical Approach to DevOps
We need a holistic approach to DevOps, one that treats tools, workers who use them and the wider organizations as contributing parts of an interdependent whole.
Nostalgia is when you want things to stay the same. I know so many people staying in the same place. Jeanne Moreau Technology is becoming increasingly complex and is rapidly changing our lives. Eve…
The board can keep running OpenAI forever if it wants, as a technical matter of controlling the relevant legal entities. But if everyone quits to join Sam Altman at Microsoft, then what is the point of continuing to control OpenAI?
Securing our home labs: Home Assistant code review
The GitHub Security Lab examined the most popular open source software running on our home labs, with the aim of enhancing its security. Here's what we found and what you can do to better protect your own smart home.
Why WebAssembly Is a Good Fit for Extensible Control Planes
In software architecture, there's a constant push-pull between highly opinionated systems and more flexible options. Wasm might help resolve that conflict.
White whale (noun): The record you have spent a long time, sometimes years, searching for.
In the record community, each collector has a white whale, one or two records they’ve been searching for yet cannot find. Unlike Captain Ahab, our white whales didn’t take half our leg, though. (I have no idea if other collectible communities use this term, but wouldn’t be surprised.)
Thanks to Discogs, it’s not hard to find your white whale, so I would add “…at a reasonable cost” to the definition.
We have a tendency to think that making any one part of the workflow more efficient will make the overall workflow also more efficient and that’s just not true. Part of that is that not all parts of the workflow are on the critical path and improving something that isn’t currently a bottleneck won’t help the overall flow. But there’s a second reason that’s less obvious - sometimes optimizing for simple cases in the workflow, can make other parts of the workflow much worse.
There are advantages that make low code a valuable tool, but organizations should be realistic about how cost and vendor lock-in may create roadblocks.