Technology Commentary

Takeaways from Cat Wu’s fireside chat with Addy Osmani

Velocity is table stakes. Code is a commodity. Understanding is the edge.

Shipping faster can weaken systems when DevOps teams chase velocity over reliability, feedback loops and technical debt reduction.

It’s a phrase we use a lot in our community, “Drink the Kool-Aid”, meaning becoming unreasonably infatuated with a dubious idea, technology, or company. It has its origins in 1960…

An unprivileged Android app can leak the user's real IP past Always-On VPN + lockdown by handing system_server a UDP payload to fire on its behalf.

I had that written on my office whiteboard for a while last year. I had just finished working with a client for over a year where the whole team pair-programmed full-time (we also did a lot of mobbing). I was then starting work with a new client, and I wanted to remind myself to push for pair-programming as much as possible because it is a cheat code for developers AND for businesses. Here are some of

Last week, Elizabeth Lopatto published an insightful article in The Verge. It boasted an intriguing title: ​“Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want.”​ “Within ... Read more

Genies give you code that’s a degraded facsimile of the mediocre code it trained on.

How do you fund work people don't want to pay for?

People love your work because of its impact, not how it works.

How travel has become an act of collection

The dashboard is green. The system is fragile. Taylor 1911, Goodhart 1975, Strathern 1997, Jeffries 2019: we were warned by name and kept the stopwatch under a procession of new names.

No.400 — Extrapolated futures archive ⊗ The dissonance is expanding ⊗ South Korea to spur a renewables revolution ⊗ Eye contact with a humpback whale

A meditation

No.399 — The term “AGI” is almost useless at this point ⊗ Frugal AI ⊗ Design futures in infrastructure ⊗ The AI revolution in math has arrived ⊗ First Indigenous Group to ban data centers from its land ⊗ A macro array of colorful slime molds

Are you frustrated with how the internet works? Me too. Today I’m going to think out loud about why. I’ve been writing for decades about what I’ve been calling “conversation…

Have you noticed all the folks bragging about the cool new tools they’ve hacked up using AI? In the last month or so, I’ve read newsletters from half a dozen or so people detailing vibe…

Friendster was the first social network. It has a long history, but the website friendster.com went dead in 2015 and the company officially…

One of the most important pieces of AI commentary: "software brain" is important to understand if we want to get through this era with our humanity intact.

Software brain is changing the world, but most people still aren’t buying.

Posted on Wednesday 29 Apr 2026. 1,087 words, 19 links. By Matt Webb.

GitLab, 31 January 2017, 23:30 UTC. Three hundred gigabytes deleted in two seconds. Eighteen hours later, the team had discovered that all five backup mechanisms were broken in different ways. Tales from the Bare Metal, Episode 01: a forensic walk through the most-cited operational postmortem in software engineering, and the principle the unixoid tradition has held all along.

I feel terribly guilty when I visit a new city, post photos of my travels, only to have a friend say "Hey! Why didn't you let me know you were in my neck of the woods?" Similarly, if I bump into an old acquaintance at a conference, we both tend to say "If only I'd known you were here, we could have had dinner together last night!" I do enjoy the serendipity of events like FOSDEM - randomly…

Code review is good at inspecting intent. It's structurally blind to a specific class of bugs - the ones where valid-looking data exposes wrong assumptions across layers. Here's why, and what complements review for input boundaries.

I have seen a common remark from people who are not the biggest fans of Odin and it is usually the remark that Odin is "full of sugar" which only works for the "blessed types" and it cannot be replaced or implemented for user-level types. Firstly, I don't think this is necessarily an example of "sugar" since that term implies it is shortening a construct / feature / idea into something smaller, whilst a lot of the ideas in Odin that would be classed as "blessed syntax" by such people would not be classed "sugar"...

Here’s what we’ve done—and what we’re still doing—to improve our availability and reliability.

Why predictable CSS state resolution matters, and how Tasty approaches it with state maps and non-overlapping selectors.

The defense industry lost the ability to make weapons when crisis hit. The same pattern is eroding software engineering skills. The timelines are identical.

A colleague told me something recently that I keep thinking about.She said, unprompted, that she appreciated seeing both sides of my AI conversations. Not