Posted on Monday 27 Nov 2023. 976 words, 13 links. By Matt Webb.

I've heard a lot about Vim, both pros and cons. It really seems you should be (as a developer) faster with Vim than with any other editor. I'm using Vim to do some basic stuff and I'm at best 10 ti...

Looking at patterns in the syntax of Unix utilities. Approaching the Unix ecosystem from a linguistic perspective.

The great thing about measuring developer productivity is that you can quickly identify the bad programmers. I want to tell you about the worst programmer I know, and why I fought to keep him in the team.

INTERCEPTORS ARE SO COOL! Sometimes you need some “generic rails” that are still highly adaptable to other uses. This is the basic problem solved by the Interceptor pattern. I really love the way OkHttp does interceptors for the generic rails of making HTTP calls, so I wanted to walk through a case study of why an interceptor might be useful and then try to synthesize some lessons & a minimal example of the pattern.

From table hacks to CSS kludges, these are some of the techniques that helped web developers get their fancy pages on the internet.

There is a deep love that is hard to understand or express: the simplicity and purity of the relationship, sound of keyboard, the feeling of control, the gratification of the outcome, the challenge of the puzzle, the room for improvement, the patience of the machine…

In Staff Engineer’s chapter on Managing Technical Quality, one of the very last suggestions is creating a centralized process to curate technical changes: Curate technology change using architecture reviews, investment strategies, and a structured process for adopting new tools. Most misalignment comes from missing context, and these are the organizational leverage points to inject context into decision-making. Many organizations start here, but it’s the last box of tools that I recommend opening.

Security researcher Barrett Lyon, who makes visualizations of the internet's network infrastructure, is back with a new piece chronicling the rise of the IPv6 protocol.

A framework to identify the causal impact of successful visual components.

The Crux by Richard Rumelt is a fantastic follow on to his Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, providing many of the same core ideas but in a more readable format, and a clearer target to take down: the incoherent outputs of process and goal-driven strategy. Recently, I’ve been looking for more strategy books to read, and folks pointed out that I’d missed a new book from Richard Rumelt, The Crux. No book has influenced my thinking about strategy more than Rumelt’s previous work, Good Strategy, Bad Strategy, so I felt obligated to pop this one to the top of my reading queue.

Posted on Friday 24 Nov 2023. 631 words, 5 links. By Matt Webb.

Extracting relevant information from large blobs of text, such as text files, PDFs, Excel spreadsheets, JSON files, can be a time-consuming and frustrating task. Everyone in OSINT will most likely acknowledge this since processing and exploiting the collected data in an OSINT investigation is one of most time consuming tasks on average. Within Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) we very often collect large amounts of data in the form of text. During investigations there often is a need to extract v

Pablo talks about how and why we use Elixir at Ramp.

As OpenAI's chaos comes to an end, AI development will never be the same.

American Express has established an open source program office that gamifies the safe development of open source code that can be poured back into the community.

The disruptive power of the cassette anticipated the even greater tectonic shift that the digital age would bring to music.

A short note on two related rules of thumb.

A post by Zach Leatherman (zachleat)

Hire the CEO, hire the team, send the CEO back, take a seat on the board — Microsoft will do just about anything to keep OpenAI afloat.

The Cassette tape was great in so many ways, but let’s be honest, they never really sounded great.  But because the cassette was so much cheaper and easier to use and portable, a lot of people didn’t care so much about the audio quality. They just wanted to be able to use something that they

Recently, I am thinking quite a bit about engineering strategy, and as part of that have started re-reading previous resources on the topic, and looking for new things to read while I refine my point of view on what makes for good engineering strategy. The best introduction to my current theory of engineering strategy is Solving the Engineering Strategy Crisis, which has both written and video versions. You can also reading my other strategy writing via the strategy tag.