Technology Commentary

Protocol as investigation and critique.

What if you could easily reduce the length of outages by 3X? According to the SRE book, "recording t...

With all the chatter about tech layoffs and Elon Musk radically scaling back Twitter, I was reminded of a blog post I wrote long ago about the size of Microsoft. I wrote this in January 2005–…

Every explanation is a simplification.There are many ways to understand how containers work, but most useful explanations are actually simplificati...

The man who gave us the World Wide Web talks about Solid, his ambitious plan to give us all a private place to store—and selectively share—our online data.

Do language models need to deliver reproducible results?

Posted on Tuesday 8 Nov 2022. 1,213 words, 9 links. By Matt Webb.

I heard about VHS recently. It’s a tool for creating recordings of command-line tools, so you can create little demos and tutorials about how to use them. You can write a script to run comman…

This tool helps your team understand and improve by making fragmented information organized and accessible.

In the ongoing discussions about the still-evolving world of hybrid cloud, the focus tends to be on what enterprises are doing within their own

Twitter, Lyft, Stripe and several other companies had major layoffs last week, and with the undeniable tragedy of layoffs, a frequent debate has reemerged. Are the tech employees working hard enough? Is working hard a sign of puritanical virtue? Are long hours a sign of inefficient production that ignores a century of productivity research? Unless you place a premium on social networking engagement, participating in these debates isn’t very rewarding. Folks enter the discussion with their mind made up, some jabs are thrown, and then the discussion winds down with the participants feet solidly in their starting positions.

From building the app store to forging a new approach to personal data on the blockchain.

It’s helpful to recall what the key value drivers for engineering and general management are, especially in times of crisis.

Introduction to Elixir, What is it, How does it work, What does it ship

A few weeks ago I bought a piano. It’s a digital piano, which I’m quite excited about for a few reasons: I remain haunted by forgetting to water our piano as a child, it was a ninety pound package that I could install myself rather than a standard piano’s seven hundred pound stature, and most importantly it actually fit in the available nook. One motivation was that our son loves music.

I am diving into the regulation of some of the major industries within the United States to better understand how regulation may unfold for the web using APIs. We are already seeing regulation in the areas of banking, healthcare, and privacy, so I want to have a basic understanding of how the railroads, electricity, telephone, radio, aerospace, and other heavily regulated industries came to be. I do not think everything from the world of railroad regulation will apply to the web, but I am sure there are some lessons in there. As I do with my research, I’ll work through a variety of stories on this blog, with the first one being a summary of regulation and deregulation when it comes to the railroads.

A decade ago, after the Arab Spring, everyone was talking about Twitter. Five years ago, when Space X and Tesla were starting to make serious progress,

So far the experience of using Twitter under Musk is pretty much unchanged. Same goes for Facebook. Yes, there is a lot of hand-wringing, and the stock market hates Meta (the corporate parent to wh…

Today on Heavy Networking we have a round-table discussion about Data Processing Units (DPUs). These devices let you bring networking, security, and storage capabilities closer to server workloads without burdening server CPUs. Guests Pete Lumbis and Aaron Glenn help us dissect DPUs, identify use cases, discuss adoption and operational challenges, and more.

Posted on Friday 4 Nov 2022. 1,037 words, 9 links. By Matt Webb.

The search engine that kept up at the speed of blogging created a “search war” with Google. But eventually, the speed of blogging just wasn’t fast enough.

Technology in the Fog Software Development, API development, Indutrial IOT

Learn JavaScript and NodeJS frameworks in plain English

Like with cookware sets and knife block sets, kitchen utensil sets likely don’t offer the best value or performance. Here’s what we recommend buying instead.