Technology Commentary

Posted on Friday 10 Nov 2023. 1,420 words, 18 links. By Matt Webb.

Applying Markov chains to a Taskmasker task.

As a leader, you want to effect change. But too much change can be detrimental and a sign of an unhealthy team. Here’s how to find the right balance.

Today, almost everything about our lives is digitally recorded and stored somewhere. Each credit card purchase, personal medical diagnosis, and preference about music and books is recorded and then used to predict what we like and dislike, and—ultimately—who we are. This often happens without our...

Kubernetes core maintainers should weigh the benefits of proposed new features against the additional complexity they would bring, the Kubernetes co-founder advised at this year's KubeCon.

The creator of the first ever banner ad on why it worked so well, and why its modern incarnations miss the mark

Last week in our Error 402 series on the history of web monetization, we covered how early paywalls for content almost universally failed. We’ll explore a bit more of the why later, but first we ne…

Manual integration testing for microservices is like trying to make cats march in a parade. There’s a better way.

Removing any form of CSS post-processing has me nostalgic for the other web development strategies that have become obsolete thanks to modern development strategies.

It is not recommended to use eBPF without a proper service provider and third-party tool set.

Continuous compliance through automation is key to stopping compliance and security errors before they happen, not just when you discover them.

The EU is poised to pass a sweeping new regulation, eIDAS 2.0. Buried deep in the text is Article 45, which returns us to the dark ages of 2011, when certificate authorities (CAs) could collaborate with governments to spy on encrypted traffic—and get away with it. Article 45 forbids browsers from...

I really, really don’t want an online integrated development environment. Why local IDEs still reign supreme in a cloud-crazy world.

The management consulting firm McKinsey & Company recently posted a blog post titled Yes, you can measure software developer productivity. The post prompted a lot of responses, such as Kent Bec…

A conversation with Imran Chaudhri, a former Apple designer and co-founder of Humane about the future of personal computing in the age of artificial intelligence.

If you think of Humane’s AI Pin as just another device, it is easy to shrug your shoulders. However, when you place it in the context of the development of computing, you can see we are at the star…

Because of the uniquely strong protection of individual liberties enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and a key legal precedent established by the courts, the United States is the only place I’m aware of in which Linux would remain freely accessible.

The way how software companies work has changed. A new need has emerged — the need for T-shaped Developers.

Geneva, Switzerland — Unicode revolutionized the written word, but it has one downside: It favors Roman languages by making the byte…