Technology Commentary

archived 11 Mar 2026 16:04:31 UTC

archived 18 Mar 2026 10:12:16 UTC

No one will say that a failure to do verification properly is what killed social media. Except for me. I believe it’s the main reason for the mess we’re in.

Most real-time features are one-way. The browser solved this in 2015 with one line of JavaScript that nobody teaches.

Every mainstream programming language was designed by a mathematician. Not one linguist in the room. Ninety years later, we are still writing in their notation.

syslog has existed since 1983. In 2026, a mid-sized company spends $708,000 per year to know whether its servers are running. The observability tax, itemised.

Eric Allman wrote syslog in the 1980s. Forty years of production. Zero licence fees. Four commands that do what a vendor contract promises and rather frequently fails to deliver.

John Gruber wrote the specification in 2004. A Perl script. 1,122 lines. Twenty-two years later, the format has not changed. It is text.

Your frontend needs live data. React taught a generation to poll. The browser solved this in 2011 with two lines of JavaScript and zero npm packages.

You wanted to track bugs. You got a bureaucracy engine with custom fields nobody remembers creating and workflows nobody dares to simplify. The Jira invoice, itemised.

In 1964, Douglas McIlroy wrote a memo about coupling programmes like garden hose. Nine years later, Ken Thompson implemented it overnight. One character changed computing.

Every Electron app ships its own copy of Chromium. Slack, Discord, Teams, VS Code. Four apps, four browsers, none displaying a web page. The Electron tax, itemised.

You wanted to provision a server. You got a proprietary language, a state file full of secrets in plain text, and a licence that changed overnight. The Terraform invoice, itemised.

For nearly two decades, WordPress has been known for a simple, powerful idea: that anyone should be able to get online and start creating with minimal friction. The famous five-minute install captu…

And it made me wonder what the future of UI holds

John O'Nolan built a CLI for his own product - and found himself using it in an entirely new way. The underlying trend here is really exciting.

If you were anywhere near a computer in the mid-to-late 1990s, you almost certainly encountered a Zip drive. That distinctive purple peripheral, with its satisfying clunk as you slotted in a cartri…

Digital Convergence Corporation is hardly a household name, and there’s a good reason for that. However, it raised about $185 million in investments around the year 2000 from companies such a…

Over-engineering slows delivery, raises costs, and kills products. Learn why it happens—and how to build simpler, stronger software.

Developer experience is the critical multiplier for engineering output. Learn why DX determines which teams ship faster, retain talent, and outperform.

News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.

News and insights on the Android platform, developer tools, and events.

OpsOrch stitches together telemetry, incident response, and automation so teams can see, decide, and act with confidence.

We audited 30 AI agent projects. 93% use unscoped API keys with no per-agent identity, no consent, and no revocation.

From database BLOBs to object stores — understanding the architecture patterns and when to use each

People assume the interface of an open source project is the API surface. The README. The documentation. The function signatures and the error messages and...

WebAssembly is breaking out of the browser into servers, edge, and plugins. Explore why WASM is becoming the universal runtime for 2026 and beyond.

lshaz is a Clang/LLVM-based static analysis tool that detects microarchitectural latency hazards. That includes false sharing, atomic contention, cache line geometry problems. All at compile time, before code ships.