“Don’t write clever code.” Why not? “Because it’s hard to understand.” People who say this think of clever code such as Duff’s Device : Duff's Device send(to, from, count) register short * to, * from;
Show caption Chelsea’s N’Golo Kante celebrates with the European Cup in Porto. Photograph: David Ramos/EPA N'Golo Kanté N’Golo Kanté: the one-man midfield who conquered Europe for Chelsea As every suc
Add WebAssembly, get performance. Is that how it really works? The incredibly unsatisfying answer is: It depends. It depends on oh-so-many factors, and I’ll be touching on some of them here. Why am I
Photo by Paula Mariel Salischiker You’ve probably heard of “open source software.” If you pay attention to the politics of this stuff, you might have heard of “free software” and even know a little a
Manager burnout: Brutal truths about alcohol, ‘dreading’ matches and the ‘relief’ of being sacked Stuart James Mar 24, 2021 “You kind of know when you’re not cut out to be a manager…” Niall Quinn says
Cryptocurrencies and NFTs are an absolute disaster for so many more reasons than the ecological. everest pipkin Mar 3 · 22 min read I am so mad I had to write this , the world’s most self-evident take
Real-world experience with the new M1 Macs has started ticking in. They are fast. Real fast. But why? What is the magic? Erik Engheim Nov 28, 2020 · 23 min read Image: Apple On YouTube, I watched a Ma
(Other contributors: Adam Crafton and Andy Mitten) It began in Zilina, a sleepy university town nestled in the foothills of the western Carpathians. A crowd of around 6,000 had crammed into the Pod Du
My work brings me though a lot of software correctness techniques, things like type theory, test-driven development (TDD), and formal methods. The surrounding communities all have the same problem: th
I joined Dropbox not long after graduating with a Master’s degree in computer science. Aside from an internship, this was my first big-league engineering job. My team had already begun designing a cri
Editor’s Note: This story was included in The Athletic’s Best of 2020. View the full list. When AC Milan’s executives go to work on a morning it’s hard to miss the entrance to the museum on the ground
One of the key elements of Google's software engineering culture is the use of defining software designs through design docs. These are relatively informal documents that the primary author or authors
When I started my career in development, my first job was a DBA. Back then, before AWS RDS, Azure, Google Cloud and the rest of them cloud services, there were two types of DBAs: The Infrastructure DB
Editor’s Note: This story was included in The Athletic’s Best of 2020. View the full list. At 10pm on the day Leeds United and Marcelo Bielsa finally shook hands, I received a text message from South
One of the challenges of application engineering within an established company like Dropbox is to break out of the cycle of incremental improvements and look at a problem fresh. Our colleagues who do
May 27th, 2020 The 20th century didn’t really begin in the year 1900, it began in 1914, when the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand triggered long-simmering international tensions and the wo
Articles / Python async frameworks - Beyond developer tribalism I’ve been thinking about writing this article for a bit, but have been most prompted by a post grandly titled “ Async Python is not fast
In 1993, the Argentinian club Quilmes supposedly made a pact with a bruja [witch] named Dora. They would win promotion from the second division in exchange for cold hard cash: US$4000, as the peso was
On 13 November 1985, Søren Lerby famously took part in two matches in two different countries – neither of them of great importance. Denmark had already qualified for the World Cup for the first time
Around Christmas, the Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp criticised the “crazy” demands made on top players who, given the proliferation of fixtures, can find themselves with only two weeks off a year fro
I read J.K. Rowling’s essay . I regret doing so. Here are some thoughts. Trans readers, brace yourselves, especially if you didn’t read the original. Some help came from Andrew James Carter’s response
Anarchism has always been a philosophy of mutual self aid, freedom, cooperation, dismantling illegitimate hierarchies, and moving towards open democratic structures in all aspects of life. Generally s
One of the main appeals of using asyncio is being able to fire off many coroutines and run them concurrently. How many ways do you know for waiting for their results? There’s quite a bit of them! Howe
F or a few fleeting moments during New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s daily coronavirus briefing on Wednesday, the somber grimace that has filled our screens for weeks was briefly replaced by something rese
May 1 st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making
Hello! This article took a while to cobble together. If you find it useful, please consider leaving a donation via DonorBox , BuyMeACoffee , or Ethereum . (Thought I'd try something new!) Or, just buy yourself a nice Roost through my Amazon affiliate link . Donation or not, thank you for reading! 😊…
Motivation: collaboration and ownership It's amazing how easily we can collaborate online nowadays. We use Google Docs to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations; in Figma we work together on user interface designs; we communicate with colleagues using Slack; we track tasks in…
On the 11th of January 1982 twenty-two computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email). Attendees included the guy who would create Sun Microsystems , the guy who made Zork , the NTP guy , and the guy who convinced the government to pay for Unix . The problem…
Cindy Sridharan Sep 29, 2019 · 31 min read Note — Thanks, as ever, to Fred Hebert , for reading a draft of this post and making some sterling suggestions. There’s a fair bit of chatter about the virtues of testing in production these days. I’ve myself written about this topic over a year ago. This…
I delivered the following talk this morning at WordCamp Vienna 2020 . Entitled “WordPress’s role in a changing web”, I wanted to explain how fragile the open web is becoming, share a case study in how to keep it open, and spell out why the time for the WordPress project to act is now. Right. Now.…
This post is going to explain a couple of things that I often see people getting confused about. If you’ve got any background in statistics, decision theory, or similar it may be quite obvious to you – this post is for everyone else. When people make decisions they often make the wrong ones.…
Increasingly popular in the last couple of years, I think 2020 is going to be the year of“no code”: the movement that say you can write business logic and even entire applicationswithout having the training of a software developer. I empathise with people doing this,and I think some of the “no code”…
This is Chapter 9 in a blog series. If you’re new to the series, visit the series home page for the full table of contents. Part 4: Politics, in 3D “Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.” – Henry Adams Chapter 9: Political Disney World I grew up in Newton,…
This is Chapter 8 in a blog series. If you’re new to the series, visit the series home page for the full table of contents. Chapter 8: Idea Labs and Echo Chambers “Sheep wish no taste but woolly sweet conformity.” ― Kevin Focke _____________ Chapter 7 began with a question: “Why do we believe what…
It all started with a tweet: “It” refers to the current imbroglio surrounding Daryl Morey, the General Manager for the Houston Rockets of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and the latter’s dealings with China. The tweet, a reference to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, 1 “hurt the feelings…
It’s October, and we’re all getting ready for Halloween, so allow me to me tell you a horror story, in Python: 12 >>> 0.1 + 0.2 - 0.3 5.551115123125783e-17 Some of you might already be familiar with this chilling tale, but for those who might not have experienced it directly, let me briefly recap.…
This computational research lab is reinventing computer programming Sep 18, 2019 · 28 min read Walking into Dynamicland, a computational research lab and communal computer in Oakland, the first thing I notice is the array of projects spread out across several work tables and the kitchen countertop.…
08.16. 2019 My mom fainted the first time she set foot in an American supermarket. It was 1981 and we were freshly arrived in America, and some combination of the culture shock and smell and sensory overload of a Safeway was too much for her, not normally a fainting woman. I didn’t faint, but I…
On August 14th, The We Company (the company formerly known as WeWork) filed its mandatory S-1 paperwork to go public, and it’s worth reading in full . I mean, forget the serious stuff for a moment. The thing begins with an epigram: “We dedicate this to the energy of we — greater than any one of us,…
“A lie is a lie is a lie,” Whoopi Goldberg said. It was May 2nd, and she was on the set of “The View,” the daytime talk show that she co-hosts. The subject was Attorney General William Barr , who had argued that the special counsel Robert Mueller ’s report was not as alarming as it seemed—endorsing…
Jonathan