Technology Commentary

Software brain is changing the world, but most people still aren’t buying.

Posted on Wednesday 29 Apr 2026. 1,087 words, 19 links. By Matt Webb.

GitLab, 31 January 2017, 23:30 UTC. Three hundred gigabytes deleted in two seconds. Eighteen hours later, the team had discovered that all five backup mechanisms were broken in different ways. Tales from the Bare Metal, Episode 01: a forensic walk through the most-cited operational postmortem in software engineering, and the principle the unixoid tradition has held all along.

I feel terribly guilty when I visit a new city, post photos of my travels, only to have a friend say "Hey! Why didn't you let me know you were in my neck of the woods?" Similarly, if I bump into an old acquaintance at a conference, we both tend to say "If only I'd known you were here, we could have had dinner together last night!" I do enjoy the serendipity of events like FOSDEM - randomly…

Code review is good at inspecting intent. It's structurally blind to a specific class of bugs - the ones where valid-looking data exposes wrong assumptions across layers. Here's why, and what complements review for input boundaries.

I have seen a common remark from people who are not the biggest fans of Odin and it is usually the remark that Odin is "full of sugar" which only works for the "blessed types" and it cannot be replaced or implemented for user-level types. Firstly, I don't think this is necessarily an example of "sugar" since that term implies it is shortening a construct / feature / idea into something smaller, whilst a lot of the ideas in Odin that would be classed as "blessed syntax" by such people would not be classed "sugar"...

Here’s what we’ve done—and what we’re still doing—to improve our availability and reliability.

Why predictable CSS state resolution matters, and how Tasty approaches it with state maps and non-overlapping selectors.

The defense industry lost the ability to make weapons when crisis hit. The same pattern is eroding software engineering skills. The timelines are identical.

A colleague told me something recently that I keep thinking about.She said, unprompted, that she appreciated seeing both sides of my AI conversations. Not

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

ChatGPT has been publicly available for over three years now, and generative AI is woven into the tools students use every day: web search, word processors,

Current LLM infrastructure artificially limits developer control and system reliability.

The following article originally appeared on 'Dan Shapiro's blog' and is being reposted here with the author's permission.Companies are now producing dark

Message brokers look simple when one team owns them. The problems change when Kafka or RabbitMQ becomes shared infrastructure.

Livecoding Music with Fennel and Renoise

Here's my current approach to leverage AI to move fast while mitigating the risk of eroding my skills.

(This is a bit of a merger of two talks I recently gave about fascism and AI. One was in German at the Cables Of Resistance conference, one in English at the Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy. I added some shots of the slides I used as a structure for the text which […]

Once upon a time, at the dawn of the web, browsers and websites were simple ... Then slowly, step by step, more and more interactivity was added.

Against the backdrop of mass layoffs, LLMs, site-builders and vibe coding what does it mean to conscientiously build for the web, and where do we go from here?

A new book shows how to turn a crisis into the change you've been waiting for

A look at the fascinating history behind the one programming language with magical powers.

The EEF needs your support for a major security grant, Hex.pm completes its first security audit, José Valim drops a massive Tidewave update, and we discuss the ClickFix supply chain attack that hit Axios, and more!

As technology has developed in the last twenty years, it has brought with it a sense of enablement. Over time, access to nearly everything has become simpler, and as such, the message from Silicon Valley and its offshoots was that you can do it all.  I have worked in the music industry since the late […]

Long ago, in the aftermath of the UNIX wars, three kernels emerged from the rubble: BSD, Linux, and Hurd. BSD, being UNIX, was held back by legal wrangling in the aftermath of the wars, and that al…

2,624 lines of C. One file. One socket. No config. The private key never leaves the process. Born from impatience, designed with discipline.