Technology Commentary

We can only write good code together

The design of the Gregorian calendar can be explained by looking at how best to approximate 365.2422 with a rational number.

There are 14 possible calendar patterns using the Gregorian calendar. Why is that? How common is each one

Thoughts about Ruby, Rails, Hanami, Elixir, Phoenix, Javascript and Unix.

OpenAI recently published a public writeup for an incident they had on December 11, and there are lots of good details in here! Here are some of my off-the-cuff observations: Saturation With thousa…

No.337 — The alchemy that powers the modern world ⊗ Building A Circular Future ⊗ Open Source AI year in review 2024

A couple of followups on a recent episode of In Our Time.

“It’s generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy.” Jeff Bezos, founder, Amazon On My Mind We, as modern humans, try to c…

Gather around the fire for another retelling of computer networking history

Ah, matrices. One of those core linear algebra concepts we all encountered in school. Despite their significance, I never had the chance…

And by "all," I mean everything: core product, failed pivots, miscellaneous

QwQ does number theory. So does GPT. And Gemma.

The Oxford University Press's word of the year is "brain rot." I believe that's two words, but whatever. Let an academic press have its moment in the sun, with headlines that, this time around, don't involve selling off its authors' IP to giant technology companies. "‘Brain rot’ is defined as

If I had wanted to write a column about presidential pardons, I’d find ChatGPT’s assistance a far better starting point than I’d have gotten through any general web search. But to quote Reagan: “Trust, but verify.”

Back in 2020, I wrote a piece called My skepticism towards current developer meta-productivity tools, which laid out my three core problems with developer productivity measurement tools of the time: Using productivity measures to evaluate rather than learn Instrumenting metrics required tweaks across too any different tools Generally I found tools forced an arbitrary, questionable model onto the problem Two and a half years later, I made an angel investment in DX, which at the time I largely viewed as taking a survey-driven, research-backed approach to developer productivity. I was recently chatting with Abi Noda, co-founder at DX, and thought it would be an interesting time to revise my original thesis both generally and in response to DX’s release of DX Core 4.

BLUF: On a team of around 12–20 engineers, I’m dedicating 2–3 of them solely to infrastructure—focusing on uptime, security, costs, and the developer experience.

Have you heard about Bell Labs? Recently, an article about it reached the Hacker News frontpage, triggering a flood of nostalgic comments. Bell Labs is, for many, a symbol of the ideal working environment for a curious mind: a place where there’s time, money and freedom to research whatever you want. In my own case, having a curious mind drew me from a young age towards computers and lured me into the world of programming.

Sometimes I’ll talk about something I like online and people will express shock that I can use a product that has such a clear downside. I’ve gotten people ask how I can use Things since it doesn’t have shared task lists. More recently I was told the

A new conference and a new approach for the DTrace Olympiad!

Open-source applications play a critical role in technology, offering powerful tools, innovation, and community-driven development. However, many users have noticed that the user interfaces (UIs) of open-source software often lack the polish and finesse of their commercial, closed-source counterparts. This perceived gap isn’t due to a lack of talent but arises from unique challenges and priorities inherent to open-source projects.

2.4K votes, 198 comments. 72K subscribers in the VHS community. Do you trip over a stack VHS tapes in the morning? Do you look through bins of old…

This person posted a bunch of images of their dad’s old VHS tapes with lovingly hand-drawn labels indicating their contents. Kids, this is what people did before the internet. Also, it’s weird/interesting that CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, LaserD

One day, after a particularly arduous coding session with Rust, I decided to vent my frustrations with this language on pen and paper (or keyboard and pixel?). My rant ended up going viral. I spent 18

Listen up, tech oligarchs; lend an ear, simpering brohanions. We’re doing this generative AI thing all wrong, and if you continue down your current path, your house of cards will fall, leaving all …

This shift in terminology is more than just semantics — it shapes culture, expectations, and, ultimately, the success of innovation.

The MapLibre Organization is an umbrella for open-source mapping libraries.

Did you know that most printer ink isn’t even expensive to make? Why then is it so expensive to refill the ink on your printer? The answer is actually pretty simple: monopolies, weird laws, and