The following is drawn from a speech I delivered today at Cooper Union’s Great Hall in New York City, where I joined Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman to discuss the future of the American Dream: What is the American Dream? In 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, James Truslow Adams first…

Whenever I publish something about my Python Docker workflows, I invariably get challenged about whether it makes sense to use virtual environments in Docker containers. As always, it’s a trade-off, and I err on the side of standards and predictability. I am keenly aware that – especially with…

First published June 2017. I had been coaching at Facebook for 6 years at this point. I wanted to reflect on how the most effective people got to where they were. After coaching hundreds of engineers, I got to thinking about why more people don’t reach the top levels. Part of it is the curve—the top…

Jul 11, 2023 · 12 min read Written by Max Alper Last year, a private student of mine had gotten in touch with me via email at around 3 AM. I had known this student for years prior, as they were in one of the earliest college courses I ever taught when they were an undergraduate at CUNY. This…

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. The very short version: All of computing is moving to the cloud at a rapid pace, including (government) parts you might want to keep under your own control Europe has no relevant ‘hyperscaler’ cloud providers at all, and…

Chesterton’s Fence is an extremely important concept, especially if you are joining a new team in a senior or in a leadership position. The concept dates from around 1929. The original text is longer, but a concise version is: “Do not take a fence down if you don’t know why it was put up in the…

Your support helps us to tell the story Support Now From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which…

When people talk about code reviews, they focus on the reviewer. But the developer who writes the code is just as important to the review as the person who reads it. There’s scarcely any guidance on preparing your code for review, so authors often screw up this process out of sheer ignorance. This…

Hey readers! Quick note before we jump in: This is a post about something I’ve been wanting to write about forever: careers. Society tells us a lot of things about what we should want in a career and what the possibilities are—which is weird because I’m pretty sure society knows very little about…

PyData Berlin 2018 Sure, party like it's 1999, but maybe let's not write SQL like it's 1992? Yeah, 1992 was a great year—Boyz II Men, Red Hot Chili Peppers, TLC—but you're missing a lot if you haven't updated your playlist since then. And not just Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Drake, but also SQL99, SQL03,…

I spent the last six months working six time zones ahead of the six people on my team. I’ve always put travel as a top priority so I took advantage of my travel-friendly work setup to spend time in Asia. D4 Software, the company I work for, isn’t a large or fully-remote company like Buffer or…

It's annual performance evaluation time at my employer, ZipRecruiter, and as part of that I have to write a self-evaluation. I know many people dread these, and I used to dread them, but these days I like doing it. Instead of being a torture or even a chore, for the last couple of years I have come…

It’s hardly controversial to note that the traditional business model for most publishers, particularly newspapers, is obsolete. Absent the geographic monopolies formerly imposed by owning distribution, newspapers have nothing to offer advertisers: the sort of advertising that was formerly done in…

I dove deep into census data and wrote the story I've always wanted to write about programmers working from home. https://t.co/WOESpj0ty7 https://t.co/mOpFYjMjof

"Accessible Resistance." https://t.co/pUCDE5phk2

Look, I don’t know why iPad sales are trending down, you don’t know why they are, and actually no one knows why they are. You know how I know that? Because even Apple doesn’t know why, and they have the biggest motivation of anyone to figure out why. Let’s play a simple game: What’s the best tablet…

An in-depth Spinoff investigation reveals exactly who invented What Now gunge and unravels the mystery of the secret recipe. Calum Henderson reports. A traditional What Now gunging. (Photo: YouTube – ‘What Now’s Best Gunge!’) “I was gunged while wearing a huge chicken suit in 1999.” “I was gunged in…

What the Hell is going on in Pontypandy? @Lukeurmyson has a plan for the fire-prone Hell-hole https://t.co/xfd3uPln8C

Next post Previous post When PCalc 3.6.1 came out a little over a week ago, I saw something disturbing in the release notes: Round function now always rounds half upwards to the nearest integer. Blasphemy! I cried. For is it not written in that most holy of floating point standards, that one should…

John Gruber is not impressed by the suggestion that Google’s new Pixel phone, which the company introduced at a keynote yesterday, is the first time the company has competed head-to-head with the iPhone: Google has been going head-to-head against the iPhone ever since the first Android phone…

The full story with the mindblowing rocket @elonmusk & @SpaceX just announced and why you might end up on it one day https://t.co/Ae9xdh1H8s https://t.co/jBE2BHwL3Q

With recent efforts at drafting a constitution for NZ stalled, a new and engaging approach is called for: https://t.co/5dAAl2u6Rq

Why is there a Swarbrick-shaped hole in the Herald’s 23-page election guide? Hayden Donnell has a whinge. The Herald’s recent local body election guide is mostly unremarkable. There are interviews with the main mayoral contenders. An obligatory trudge through the wards. An even more obligatory…

I started a new experiment the other day, born out of a few comments from readers. They all remarked how much better it is to edit writing with the software keyboard, over a physical one on the iPad. Which is funny because I was actually thinking about working on setting up a mechanical keyboard…

A very, very small quadcopter, one inch in diameter can carry a one- or two-gram shaped charge. You can order them from a drone manufacturer in China. You can program the code to say: “Here are thousands of photographs of the kinds of things I want to target.” A one-gram shaped charge can punch a…

Path tracing is a method for generating digital images by simulating how light would interact with objects in a virtual world. The path of light is traced by shooting rays (line segments) into the scene and tracking them as they bounce between objects. Path tracing gets its name from calculating the…

National MP Nuk Korako has the luck of the draw earlier this week, when his ‘lost luggage’ member’s bill was drawn from the biscuit tin of democracy that the Office of the Clerk keeps to conduct the member’s bill ballot. Bills, particularly amendment bills, can be hard to grasp. You might have to…

T en years ago I found myself standing outside the Automotive Hall of Fame in Dearborn, Michigan. I looked out over acres of glinting windshields in a packed parking lot. I’d reached this spot by driving from Ann Arbor on the I-94, where the highway sometimes reaches 12 lanes across, in a little…

Thoughts on building a remote culture, from a remote CEO Paul Farnell 6 min read· Aug 4, 2016 -- One of our annual meet ups. This was a beer tasting in Vermont. (Revised August 2022) One of my goals as the CEO of Litmus is to build the company I want to work for. It’s the reason we offer 28 days of…

In Part 1 of this post, I used the example of iceblocks to explain how well-intentioned efforts to reduce New Zealand’s ‘official’ dirty energy* emissions can actually increase the global total of greenhouse gases emitted to the atmosphere. I concluded that an approach to discouraging dirty energy…