When I shared my piece on Measuring an engineering organization, one point I made was that focusing too heavily on optimization metrics (e.g. things like CI/CD time) can turn engineering into a cost center. That’s not because optimization metrics aren’t important, they’re extremely important! Rather, it’s inherent to what it means to refer to an organization as a cost center. First, an obligatory definition from Investopedia: A cost center is a department or function within an organization that does not directly add to profit but still costs the organization money to operate.

On its 40th anniversary, we look back at the machine that brought the GUI to personal computers.

Customers need to dispose of old disk, tape and solid state drives, but what are the problems they face? Iron Mountain has a good idea.

🥺: the best sudo replacement - Xe's Blog

Generative AI will have a massive impact in the software industry and beyond. The goal of this post is to map out the market dynamics and business models.

"We are using money for the wrong stuff." – Carl Sagan

Lewis Rosenthal talks about why some companies still need to run OS/2 today – including on UEFI and GPT hardware

Artificial Intelligence (AI) grabs headlines with new tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2, but it is already here and having major impacts on our lives. Increasingly we see law enforcement, medical care, schools and workplaces all turning to the black box of AI to make life altering decisions– a trend we should challenge at every turn.  The vast and often secretive data sets behind this technology, used to train AI with machine learning, come with baggage. Data collected through surveillance and exploitation will reflect systemic biases and be “learned” in the process. In their worst form, the buzzwords of AI and machine learning are used to "tech wash" this bias, allowing the powerful to buttress oppressive practices behind the supposed objectivity of code. It's time to break open these black boxes. Embracing Open Data in the development of AI would not only be a boon to transparency and accountability for these tools, but makes it possible for the would-be subjects to create their own innovative and empowering work and research. We need to reclaim this data and harness the power of a democratic and open science to build better tools and a better world.

NFTs? No Friggin’ Thanks

Megan McArdle says this week, in the Washington Post, that “Twitter might be replaced, but not by Mastodon or other imitators.” I’m not linking to the article, you can easily find…

You don't have to engage with people on the Internet - Xe's Blog

Don MacVittie talks doing more with less, reducing complexity and technical debt and how to keep learning and improving your DevOps practice.

How I Spent Hours Debugging NGINX

Travel meltdowns at Southwest Airlines and the FAA have exposed how deeply we depend on outdated or unreliable computer systems. Yet as Io Dodds discovers, cancelled flights and ruined holidays are only the tip of the iceberg

The IT industry, like every other industry we suppose, is in a constant state of dealing with the next bottleneck. It is a perpetual game of Whac-a-Mole –

There are a lot of stories in the news lately about how AI is “borrowing” the work of living artists to use as source code for AI internet images.

It is news to no one that over the past ten years the influence of technology on our daily lives has grown exponentially. As processors hav…

I have some strongly-stated, loosely-held hunches about the probability of life elsewhere in the universe. My certainty about these beliefs is quite low, but it is much higher than my belief in the alternatives. 1) Life is rampant and common … Continue reading →

The Netscape IPO wasn't really about dot-commerce. At its heart was a new cultural force based on mass collaboration. Blogs, Wikipedia, open source, peer-to-peer - behold the power of the people.

Kiss your browser goodbye: The radical future of media beyond the Web By Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf, with contributions from other Wiredstaff: Erik Adigard, Andrew Anker, Ed Anuff, John Battelle, Chip Bayers, John Browning, Jim Daly, Pete Leyden, Hunter Madsen, Oliver Morton, Spencer Reiss, Louis Rossetto, and Carl Steadman. Remember the browser war between […]

Build the next generation of web experiences.

Dare to avoid bad standards Software Development, API development, Indutrial IOT

Although most APIs are built to connect internal components, there's a shift toward more externalization and monetization of public APIs.

Some engineers develop a strong point of view that meetings are a waste of their time. There’s good reason for that perspective, as many meetings are quite bad, but it’s also a bit myopic: meetings can also be an exceptionally valuable part of a well-run organization. If you’re getting feedback that any given meeting isn’t helpful, then iterate on it, and consider pausing it for the time being. It may not be useful for your organization yet, but don’t give up on the idea of meetings.