Technology Commentary

Jerod is back with another “It Depends” episode! This time he’s joined by Kris Brandow from Go Time and they’re talking all things API design. What makes a good API? Is GraphQL a solid choice? Why do we do REST wrong? And WTF does HATEOAS mean, anyway?

The Observability Query Language Standard working group seeks to establish a unified standard for observability languages.

Commissioned: The adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure remains polarizing. Some leaders lean on analytics to improve business processes and outcomes. For such folks, aping Moneyball is the preferred path for execution. Others trust their gut, relying on good old-fashioned human judgement to make decisions. Regardless of which camp you IT leaders […]

In this era of heightened data sensitivity, responsible development of generative AI is not just a legal requirement — it's an ethical imperative.

I continue to be bullish on AI and that skepticism extends to the “AI-focused” products that are coming out this year. Case-in-point: a pin…

To watch an online video you can either stream or download it. Find out the differences and when to use each in a look at streaming vs. downloading.

What are the major tech trends set to redefine the industry in 2024? Michael Cote unveils his key predictions.

In the last 25 years we have delivered on our mission to make DNS more dependable and trustworthy. These are our plans for the next five years.

When it comes to the digital world we might need a device that reverses the usual charge of wants. Instead of a small thing in your pocket that gives you exactly what you want to see at any minute, this … Continue reading →

I took a pretty rough swipe at GIMP last week, and rather than letting sleeping dogs lie, I’d like to explain my POV on the popular open-source image editor.

Ingenuity has been flying above Mars, off and on, for nearly three years.

Critics say the latest batch of new gadgets at CES 2024 will invade our privacy, steal our personal data and fill up landfills as soon as they break.

When I finished reading this (must-read) wonderful profile of Bell Labs, the singular most iconic research institution of the modern era, I was left wondering — just because you invent the fut…

Thanks for reading Micah Learns! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is the first of several papers I’ll be writing about from SOSP’2023 (Symposium on Operating Systems Principles). Blueprint: A Toolchain for Highly-Reconfigurable Microservice Applications

One of the established and most popular programming languages is the C programming language. It is relatively easy to learn, and highly practical. Maybe surprisingly, the C programming language keeps evolving, slowly and carefully. If you have GCC 13 or LLVM (Clang) 16, you already have a compiler with some of the features from the … Continue reading C23: a slightly better C

Introduction

AVIF is a recent file format that, at the time of this article, has gained support in Microsoft Edge, thereby achieving significant browser support. !Important: We are no longer in the dark ages, the…

The tool's creators are seeking to make it so that AI model developers must pay artists to train on data from them that is uncorrupted.

IntroductionIf you're only using gRPC at the application layer, I believe studying the examples on the gRPC official website is sufficient. However, when planning to extensively use gRPC within a team

Ever been in a situation where you landed a software engineering job with a particular tech stack, mastered it, switched to another company with a different stack, nailed that too, and then found yourself in a third company that used the original stack? Now, you suddenly sense that your hard-earned acumen in that initial stack has not only atrophied over the years but also a portion, or all of it, has become irrelevant, making it a bit of a struggle to catch up with the latest changes.

Perceiving the layers of context in problems will unlock another stage of career progression as a Staff-plus engineer, but there’s at least one essential skill to develop afterwards: navigating ambiguity. In my experience, navigating deeply ambiguous problems is the rarest skill in engineers, and doing it well is a rarity. It’s sufficiently rare that many executives can’t do it well either, although I do believe that all long-term successful executives find at least one toolkit for these kinds of problems.

Real-time app monitoring is about fundamentally shifting your mindset toward a culture of accountability and continuous improvement.

Most of Slack runs on a monolithic service simply called “The Webapp”. It’s big – hundreds of developers create hundreds of changes every week. Deploying at this scale is a unique challenge. When people talk about continuous deployment, they’re often thinking about deploying to systems as soon as changes are ready. They talk about microservices …

Twenty years after its debut, what is the role of the CAP theorem in modern-day distributed systems? Stumbling across the CAP theorem is like walking into a discussion (or a debate) already in progress. Imagine how others might feel walking into an argument amongst developers about which IDE is the

The CAP theorem asserts that any networked shared-data system can have only two of three desirable properties (Consistency, Availability and Partition Tolerance). In this IEEE article, author Eric Brewer discusses how designers can optimize consistency and availability by explicitly handling partitions, thereby achieving some trade-off of all three.

Discussing the piratical efforts to rip people off by counterfeiting computer hardware. It’s been happening for more than 40 years.

Above is a deranged version of the innovation curve that is often brought out when thinking about products (often tech products specifically). Here’s a better one: A very few people are “innovators” who are there on day one for new stuff and are willing to look past flaws or

This feels inevitable.

Creating a public database of NBA Apps