Technology Commentary

It was never the sexiest language, but for decades Java has been a mainstay of modern technology, and it's going to be with us for years to come.

Source code is a form of expression with its own idioms and styles. It's also a historical relic that reveals how programmers have developed solutions that underpin the software that has changed our world.

Get in, loser, we’re doing an old fashioned conversation by blog post. Dan Sinker wrote recently about the Who Cares Era: The writer didn’t care. The supplement’s editors didn’t care. The biz people on both sides of the sale of the supplement didn’t care. The production people didn’t care. And, the fact that it took two days for anyone to discover this epic fuckup in print means that, ultimately, the reader didn’t care either. It’s so emblematic of the moment we’re in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore. Then Les Orchard wrote in response that Only the Metrics Care: The user isn’t the customer. And they’re not the product either. The real product is behavioral optimization—metrics on a dashboard. The paying customer is somewhere else entirely, and the “content” is just a means to nudge behavior and juice KPIs. … The point isn’t to communicate. It’s to simulate relevance in order to optimize growth. It’s all goal-tracking, A/B tests, fake doors, and dark patterns. Both of those posts are great and you should read them, but reading them is not a prerequisite to reading this one. I just wanted to place this post in context of the conversation I’m dropping into.

You may have noticed a trend recently: ‘AI is going to replace all of the developers’. I'll admit that I have quite a lot of skin in this game, having been a software engineer for the best part of 30 years - so I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot recently To get started, I find that breaking c

Today in material science news we have a report from [German Science Guy] about a new supermaterial which is as strong as steel and as light as Styrofoam! A supermaterial is a type of material that…

Since 2023, the rise of interest rates has caused a sea change in how software companies relate to their engineers. It’s harder to be a software engineer now…

Everything will change.

Stop falsifying your motivations.

This essay explores visually how keeping data and AI on‑device could empower not only users, but also companies.

That's a long time in the microwave.

"It will make you stop and look at poles and antennas and will remind you how much digital technologies owe to the technological elements of the 19th century." –– Regine reviews latest book by art and architectural historian Carlotta Darò.

Disclaimer: This post was written May 2025, and the arguments apply to AI code capabilities at this time. The arguments around lack of competence are certainly likely to become less prevalent-while the parts about the desecration of the joys of programming, and fundamental human understanding of programming-are likely to become

The world's smallest VR headset: ultra-light form factor weighing just 107 grams with an unbelievable 116° field of view and eyetracking.

From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus

Because yes, I used to write code that “just worked”… until it didn’t.

rqlite is a lightweight, open-source, distributed relational database written in Go, which uses SQLite as its storage engine and Raft for consensus. Ten years ago, I tagged the first release of rqlite—a project I started to explore distributed consensus, to learn Go, and to build something useful. I had no roadmap, no plans for scale, and certainly no…

If we asked you to think of a device that converts a chemical reaction into electricity, you’d probably say we were thinking of a battery. That’s true, but there is another device that …

Protect Systems from the Foundation Up—Before Velocity Outpaces Safety

What’s a smartphone in today’s world ? It’s the object in everyone’s pocket that gets thrown away in 2.7 years lifespan. It’s a little bit more for an iPhone but that’s the industry average. And as everyone already strolls around with it glued to their hands, increasing the number of sales for this product, could mean … Continue reading "The real smartphone (and environment) killer? The Operating System."

With Markdown, writing HTML-formatted documents is as easy as writing plain text. Software developers use it, but so do many others.

Traditional tests don’t guarantee a bug-free system; a passing test only confirms that the tested scenario behaves as expected.