I was speaking at a conference last year on the topics of DevOps, Configuration as Code, and Continuous Delivery and used the following story to demonstrate the importance making deployments fully aut

I was recently trying to figure out how likely a bunch of end-to-end tests were to be flaky, and wanted to gather some stats about their pass/fail rates on my local machine before including them in a

It was a reasonable death. He was 90 and took the inevitable final turn in late March. “I think this is it,” my brother said from the nursing home. “They brought in the snack cart.” I went to Baltimor

I grew up multilingual and learned in earliest childhood to switch effortlessly between languages. Even today, I find myself going back and forth, sometimes even in the same entence-say . You’ll notic

Microsoft’s Build developer conference has a bit of an odd history, which I recounted in a 2016 Update : the conference was born in 2011 as a showcase for a completely new approach to Windows, but by

Intro Okay developers, time to have a serious talk. As you are probably already aware, this week React, Babel, and a bunch of other high-profile packages on NPM broke. The reason they broke is rather

Boomers build the technology we all love today I am now in my late 30s and started to learn to code around the age of 12, in 1996. My professional career as a software engineer took off in the early 2

Letter of Recommendation Commonplace Books Are Like a Diary Without the Risk of Annoying Yourself I keep a journal of quotes, lines from songs, poetry. Nothing is my original thought — but all of it s

The moment for languid afternoons spent naming the knees and the eyelashes had passed. Our classroom was the kitchen. Illustration by Eleni Kalorkoti I moved to Geneva to be with my husband, Olivier,

“The Book of Disquiet” was found, in fragments, only after Pessoa’s death. Illustration by Riccardo Vecchio If ever there was a writer in flight from his name, it was Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa is the Po

Kees van der Pijl is a retired professor. He used to teach international relations at the University of Sussex. He lives in Amsterdam and can be reached at

Beckett’s work is among the most enduring expressions of the absurdity and estrangement of modern life. PHOTOGRAPH BY KEYSTONE / GETTY In the summer of 1942, Samuel Beckett and his partner Suzanne Dec

“How to Write a Thesis,” by Umberto Eco, first appeared on Italian bookshelves in 1977. For Eco, the playful philosopher and novelist best known for his work on semiotics, there was a practical reason

One January evening a few years ago, just before the beginning of the spring term in which I was going to be teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey, my father, a retired computer scientist w

My favorite aunt, Auntie Len, when she was in her eighties, told me that she had not had too much difficulty adjusting to all the things that were new in her lifetime—jet planes, space travel, plastic

When I was a child, the grownup books in my house were arranged according to two principles. One of these, which governed the downstairs books, was instituted by my mother, and involved achieving a re

In the summer of 2016, I gave a talk at a small TED x conference in northern Virginia. I began by admitting that I’ve never had a social-media account; I then outlined arguments for why other people s

November 1, 2021 Español Português हिन्दी Chinese Dossier N°46 A data ‘cloud’ sounds like an ethereal, magical place. It is, in reality, anything but that. The images in this dossier aim to visualise

World of Wong Kar Wai: Like the Most Beautiful Times Essays — Mar 23, 2021 Share “P leasure,” wrote Samuel Butler in The Way of All Flesh, “is a safer guide than either right or duty.” Surely this is

I never imagined that, nine months after I had completed secondary school, my first story would be published in Fin de Semana , the weekend literary supplement of El Espectador , in Bogotá, and the mo