Technology Commentary

Stratechery Plus is expanding to include Sharp China with Sinocism’s Bill Bishop

The greatest beneficiaries of AI are IT professionals themselves, latest IBM survey shows.

“Enjoyed this piece by fellow @longnow @ignitetalks presenter @JasonCrawford and share it as a launchpad from which we can hopefully engage in some thoughtful public discourse. Below I'll share a few thoughts on this topic as a way of throwing sparks. https://t.co/kzlMaPvX0c 1/n”

A discussion about the changes in architecture in engineering

If you've ever wondered - What is a tuple? What is a Postgres page? What's the difference between a record and a row? What is a relation? What's an array? What is TOAST? This post is for you! These are terms you hear all the time in the Postgres world. This post breaks down what these terms mean and how they are used.

@garius: One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone. So, with everything going on at Twitter...…

“One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone. So, with everything going on at Twitter rn, time for a thread about the Trust Thermocline /1”

The recent decision by Chrome developers to no longer support JPEG XL has sent a ripple through the developer community and is a bit premature given the relative newness of the image format.

The fictional LA detective, Joe Friday, was famous for saying “Just the facts, Ma’am.” Similarly, in the tech and business worlds, “Show me the data” has

Since many of these applications are mission-critical, our customers expect that we not only deliver multi-layer security but also have the ability to make continuous improvements to keep their distributed clusters secure.

The emergence of cloud computing was predicated on the presence of flexible application platforms in centralized locations providing massive amounts of

Speakeasy Productions Witness the journey from inception to adoption of a fast-rising open source technology that vastly improves the tech industry’s ability to monitor applications that power our world.

Documentaries for developers, made with love in Berlin.

“Keep it simple, stupid” is a good advice. It’s also an obvious one because, when solving problems, nobody is thinking: “How do I make things more complex than necessary?”. Engineers generally try to keep things simple. Yet, over-engineering is found on every corner, and we keep reminding our colleagues to KISS. So why is it so hard to follow KISS advice? 🤔 KISS often means one of the following: Don’t do unnecessary things. When doing things, prefer simple solutions. Both goals are hard to achieve. Here is why: 1️⃣ We don’t stay with problems long enough One should always try to simplify a problem before attempting to solve it. Behind every complex problem is a set of simpler problems hiding from you. Decomposition, removing the non-essential parts, and reframing can simplify the problem (or completely eliminate it, if you’re lucky). But that all requires a deep understanding of the nature of the problem. And such understanding requires staying with the problem long enough – the luxury we can’t always afford. It’s not that I’m so smart; it’s just that I stay with problems longer. — Albert Einstein To be like Einstein, devote your conscious and subconscious mind to a single problem. Eliminate multitasking. Monotasking is the way to go. It’s also essential to accumulate and preserve domain knowledge. Switching business domains every year is like switching programming languages every year, never mastering any of them. Developers with deep domain expertise have a huge advantage over those new to the business. 2️⃣ More effort is needed to find simple solutions Software development is a continuous process of experimentation, discovery, and complexity elimination. Your first solution will probably be the worst. As you accumulate knowledge, your subsequent solutions will improve over time. So, to get to a simpler solution, you need more time, more experimentation, and more feedback. The key word here is “more.” Complexity is the default outcome unless you invest time to reduce it. That’s how simplicity becomes costly. The best way I know to lower the cost of simplicity is to practice eXtreme Programming: 3️⃣ Our decision-making is flawed Even engineers, who consider themselves the most intelligent species on earth, constantly make irrational, emotional, and biased decisions. And even with perfect problem understanding, you will very likely introduce accidental complexity, unless you don’t fight the following temptations: doing what large companies do (cargo culting), preferring fancy tech to boring tech (marchitecture), writing extra code and creating unnecessary abstractions for the future (speculative thinking), attaching emotionally to the code you wrote (the sunk-cost fallacy), etc. To understand the extent of your flawed thinking and what to do about it, check out “Thinking, Fast and Slow” and “Influence” books. Also, make sure you always have a solid business case for your tech decisions:

Listen to this episode from GOTO - Today, Tomorrow and the Future on Spotify. This interview was recorded at GOTO Amsterdam 2022 for GOTO Unscripted. gotopia.techRead the full transcription of this interview hereJames Lewis - Principal Consultant & Technical Director at ThoughtworksKevlin Henney - Consultant, Programmer, Keynote Speaker, Technologist, Trainer & WriterDESCRIPTIONSoftware shares multiple similarities with living creatures. Embark on a journey with Kevlin Henney, an independent consultant & speaker, and James Lewis, consultant at Thoughtworks, to undercover some of the aspects that make producing software so complex from trending frameworks, that help you understand the human component, to its disposable aspect and the way it influences companies and solves real-world problems.RECOMMENDED BOOKSKevlin Henney & Trisha Gee • 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should KnowKevlin Henney • 97 Things Every Programmer Should KnowHenney & Monson-Haefel • 97 Things Every Software Architect Should KnowMatthew Skelton & Manuel Pais • Team TopologiesMichael Jackson • Software Requirements and SpecificationsGeoffrey West • ScaleCharles Stross • Singularity SkyCharles Stross • Quantum of NightmaresCharles Stross • The Atrocity ArchivesCharles Stross • AccelerandoTed Chiang • Stories of Your Life and OthersTed Chiang • Exhalation: StoriesDev InterruptedWhat the smartest minds in engineering are thinking about, working on and investing in.Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifyTwitterLinkedInFacebookLooking for a unique learning experience?Attend the next GOTO conference near you! Get your ticket: gotopia.techSUBSCRIBE TO OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL - new videos posted alm...

Matyáš Racek's blog

There have been a lot of hot takes and chatter flying around the interwebs about web components over the last few months. We read a lot of it, but the day-to-day 280-character hot takes on Twitter are ...

Even though code can act as a common language, cultural backgrounds can make it tricky to deliver feedback. @alexandras_dev shares how to build communication expectations accordingly:

Meta deserves a bit of a discount off of its recent highs, but a number of myths about its business have caused the market to over-react.

Your boss wants a metaverse strategy, but what would that be, and what does metaverse even mean? If we strip away the noise, what can we say about this, and what can we predict?

Temporal's Samar Abbas believes developers shouldn’t have to even think about losing state. There are just these durable executions that never fail.

Welcome to intellectual property hell, designers! This one’s great because you never saw it coming: Adobe removing certain Pantone spot colors should you try to open PSD files containing them…

Owning Twitter means owning a host of impossible political problems. Is Elon ready?

There’s more than one way to sink a social network.

Combating fake news with facts doesn't work because humans are wired for emotion. It's time for more creative tactics.