The workflow that's changing how software gets built.

Although kids these days tend to hang out on so-called “Social Media”, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) was first, by decades. IRC is a real-time communication technology that allows people to…

Learn how queues make horizontal scaling, scheduling, and flow control easier in cloud systems, and how to make them durable and observable.

n.b. This is a written version of a dialogue from a YouTube video: 2 Language Creators vs 2 Idiots | The Standup Package managers (for programming languages) are evil1. To start, I need to make a few distinctions between concepts a lot of programmers mix up: A package Package Repositories Build Systems Package Managers These are all separate and can have no relation to one another. I have nothing wrong with packages, in fact Odin has packages built into the language. I have nothing wrong with repositories, as that’s how a lot of people discover new packages—a search engine, something I think everyone uses on a daily basis2. Build systems are usually language dependent/specific, and for Odin I have tried minimize the need for a build system entirely (at least as a separate thing) where most projects will build with odin build ., which works due to the linking information being defined in the source code itself with the foreign system. This leaves package managers; what do they do?

“Just use SQL”, they say. “No need for ORMs”, they add. And they may be right, but… Let's look on how this can lead to accidental complexity piling on, derailing our initially simple problem.

Why is the language developers and DBAs use to organize data such a mess? Here are 13 reasons we wish we could quit SQL, even though we probably won't.

Deep dive into building a fuzzy search engine 15x fuzzier than Lucene using bitwise Levenshtein automata. Learn how to optimize edit distance matching for high performance autocomplete and typo-tolerant search in .NET.

Sampling bufferbloat on implementations all too randomly

Michigan just became the 48th state to enact a law addressing deepfakes, imposing jail time and penalties up to the felony level for people who make AI-generated nonconsensual abuse imagery of a real person.

It has taken nearly two decades and an immense amount of work by millions of people for high performance computing to go mainstream with GenAI. And now,

In most industries, service providers boast about five nines availability — 99.999%. That sounds impressive: just five minutes of downtime per year. But DNS isn’t like most industries. For top-level domains, downtime is not acceptable. If a registry goes dark, hospitals, banking systems, and e-commerce all go offline with

Why declining requests is stressful, who it affects most, and how to navigate the pressure without burnout.

By transforming the shared staging environment into a multitenant, dynamic platform, teams can eliminate friction and reclaim their productivity.

Blogpost authors: Nimra Nadeem, Lucy He, Michel Liao, and Peter Henderson Paper authors: Lucy He, Nimra Nadeem, Michel Liao, Howard Chen, Danqi Chen, Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar, Peter Henderson A longer version of this blog is available on the POLARIS Lab website, an accompanying policy brief is available online, and the full paper can be found on […]

Posted on Thursday 4 Sep 2025. 527 words, 5 links. By Matt Webb.

Patch Boards to IDEs

It’s remarkable that PowerPC is dead in the consumer market. …

Refuting the common and flawed argument of

“I built a Redis-compatible cache that handles 25,000+ concurrent connections on my Laptop. Here’s how Elixir made it possible.”

Discussing pros and cons of different approaches to handling software versions

Explore the original 6502 BASIC—now open source! Dive into retro code, history, and emulators. Fork it, run it, and relive computing's roots.

A blog about the productivity software of the 8/16-bit era. No games, just work.

Exploring the surprising parallels between football and software.

Do you register with Google, Amazon or Microsoft to use the web?

My system worked exactly as I hoped it would.

Posted on Friday 22 Aug 2025. 649 words, 1 link. By Matt Webb.

Dave Winer, OG blogger, podcaster, developed first apps in many categories. Old enough to know better. It's even worse than it appears.