Saudi Arabia wants to host the world’s cheapest data centres With plentiful land and electricity on hand, the kingdom thinks it has found an edge A debate is raging over the origins of an elusive cousin to modern humans Who were the Denisovans? Well informed Are some types of sugar healthier than…
Aditya B
Last year, the celebrated New Yorker writer David Grann spoke with Nieman Storyboard about his book, The Wager. The interviewer asked Grann how he manages to keep coming across the kind of stories that most writers would dream of finding, even once in their lives. Here’s how Grann responded: “Coming…
Saturday, November 29, 2025 Poetry Comics Month, Day 29 Happy holiday reading! Older Post Home Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Poetry Comics Nothing Ever Happens On a Gray Day One Boy Watching The Art of Living There Is A Rainbow My Words What Sound Is Morning? I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf…
You’ve heard of the 10x engineer, but I am here to tell you about the Wolf. They are an engineer, and they consistently exhibit the following characteristics: They appear to exist outside the well-defined process we’ve defined to get things done, but they appear to suffer no consequences for not…
When you’re a junior, you should work on what you’re given. There are two reasons for this. First, your work needs to be supervised and checked by a more experienced engineer, and if you go and work on random things it makes it hard for that engineer to stay across what you’re doing. Second, the way…
ENOSUCHBLOG Programming, philosophy, pedaling. Home Tags Series Favorites Archive Main Site TILs Nov 21, 2025 Tags: oss, security TL;DR: Dependency cooldowns are a free, easy, and incredibly effective way to mitigate the large majority of open source supply chain attacks. More individual projects…
The title says it all – I am so bad at interviewing. It has nothing to do with my skills, experience, or future promise. It's just that if you ask me a question and immediately want a response where I have to recall the details of a situation from 2 years ago, it just isn't going to go well. My…
Back in 2012, as a young assistant professor, I traveled to Berkeley to attend a wedding. On the first morning after we arrived, my wife had a conference call, so I decided to wander the nearby university campus to work on a vexing theory problem my collaborators and I had taken to calling “The…
I have been writing this column for 15 years. That means there have been 180 of them, filled with wisdom, insight, whimsy, prejudice, contradiction and sometimes just outrageous stupidity, all of it interrogating the way we cook and eat now. As this is my last of these columns I thought, as a…
September 22, 2025 • 2 min read I was lucky enough to make a few friends my first semester of college. We ended up hanging out quite a bit during those early months. We’d all get excited for the weekends because Friday nights meant going out to party. Everyone except for Anna, that is. Anna was…
Before joining Pixite I spent several years as a freelance Android developer. Being 100% remote for all of those years, I learned many things about the process of hiring and employment. The biggest eye-opener for me was the realization that when you apply and interview for a job, you are selling a…
Opinion Finding Beauty Visuals by Lee Mary Manning Aug. 8, 2025 This essay is part of Finding Beauty, a series on discovering joy in the unexpected. There is a grate on Rue Danton in Paris, not too far from the university campus where I teach during the summer, that emits a particular smell: sweet,…
A feature added for no other reason than to draw management attention and be removed, thus avoiding unnecessary changes in other aspects of the product. I don’t know if I actually invented this term or not, but I am certainly not the originator of the story that spawned it. This started as a piece…
Cinq Personnes. A place to find ideas for living better smarter. By Reece · Over 1,000 subscribers By subscribing, I agree to Substack’s Terms of Use and acknowledge its Information Collection Notice and Privacy Policy
The reason the kitchen is a mess is not because the kitchen is poorly designed, it’s because we didn’t do the dishes after every meal. Michael Feathers recently wrote an eerily similar entry about the professional chef’s concept of working clean: One other thing that I liked about the Pastry Chef’s…
Indian pot belly: From status symbol to silent killer 2 hours ago Soutik BiswasIndia correspondent•@soutikBBC Getty Images The Indian pot belly - once a badge of prosperity, indulgence and aging respectability - has long been a target of satire and social commentary. In literature, it quietly…
Listen to this story with Steven Kurutz’s commentary about why he wrote it. In “Generation X,” the 1991 novel that defined the generation born in the 1960s and 1970s, Douglas Coupland chronicled a group of young adults who learn to reconcile themselves to “diminishing expectations of material…
Every six months or so, this neat group called the International Earth Rotation Service issues a directive on whether there will be a leap second inserted at the end of that six month period. You usually find out at the beginning of January or the beginning of July, and thus would have a leap second…
Software development (or, you know, life in general) is all about juggling priorities. For this post, I’m thinking specifically about code design priorities. You only have a limited amount of time to implement a feature, so you have to pick and choose which aspects of it to spend time on. Do you…
Deprecating idling resource libraries 19 February 2025 When Espresso was made public a decade ago, one of its banner features was the "idling resource" concept. This monitored the main thread and any background thread pools to prevent your test from progressing until the app became idle. Waiting…
My dad used to say, “Slow down, son. You’ll get the job done faster.” I’ve worked in many high-tech startup companies in the San Francisco Bay area. I am now 52, and I program slowly and thoughtfully. I’m kind of like a designer who writes code; this may become apparent as you read on :) Programming…
There's been a recent resurgence on twitter and the like about how teams should divide up their testing efforts. In particular, Tim Bray argues compellingly in favor of taking automated testing seriously. Anyone familiar with my writing will know that I'm very much in agreement with him. One of the…
When Joel Spolsky, my business partner on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange, asked me what I wanted to do after I left Stack Exchange, I distinctly remember mentioning Aaron Swartz. That’s what Aaron was to us hackers: an exemplar of the noble, selfless behavior and positive action that all hackers…
Obituary | One man on his island The hermit-guardian of Italy’s loveliest beach died on January 3rd, aged 85 Photograph: BILD/Stefano Laura To Polynesia! That was where Mauro Morandi wanted to go. By 1989 he had the means to get there, a 16-metre seven-cabin catamaran, “a Ferrari of the seas”. Flat,…
Cycling to work is not only good for people's health, but also good for their wallet – or in Belgium, at least. Employees receive compensation for every kilometre they ride, with some cyclists earning up to €810 per year. All employees in Belgium who cycle to work are entitled to a bicycle allowance…
Over the past 18 months or so, many people have had more time to think about what they want from their jobs, and the kind of conditions they are willing to accept. The concept of the Great Resignation tends to gloss over “essential workers,” who are still somehow not essential enough to merit a…
Credit: Pexels At DuckDuckGo, there’s an expression: “You are the DRI of your career” (DRI: Directly Responsible Individual). I like this, both as an individual who has always felt like the DRI of my own career, and I like it as a manager because I think it makes the boundaries of what you can and…
When I made breakfast this morning, I didn’t begin by making the blender. Someone else, a team with more skills, resources and scale, built the blender. I simply bought it. That seems obvious–no one expects a from-scratch baker to make their own baking powder. And yet, our projects are rarely fine…
Around about 2000, I began to consider how it would be, when and if I became an Old Hippy. Old Hippies had been a common part of my cultural heritage ever since the Eighties, when it was generally understood that they were terrible embarrassment to everyone — including, somehow, hippies. They…
In this post I discuss how to use a new Git rebasing feature, --update-refs, which was included in Git 2.38, in October 2022. This makes working with "stacked" branches a lot easier. I'm a big fan of small git commits. Especially when you're creating a big feature. I like to create a "story" with my…
En français svp In the twisting vaults of a subway, metro, or U-Bahn, there’s often no reliable cell service, wifi, or GPS. Which means you had no good way of keeping track of your stops or ETA when underground. You had to look out the window for signs on the platform, listen for station…
Drop the Hyphen in Asian American On the historical divisiveness of an unnecessary punctuation mark. By Henry Fuhrmann • January 23, 2018 Ed. note: The Associated Press Stylebook and BuzzFeed Style Guide have credited “Drop the Hyphen in ‘Asian American'” as the impetus for changing their guides. In…
Stop Wasting Time - Adopt Gradle Remote Build Cache Posted on 2022-07-13 In Caches Everywhere post I called out Gradle Remote Build Cache (RBC) as one of the types of caches in Gradle. If you are on a project that has more than a handful of people, and you are not using RBC, then you are wasting…
Published inDesigning Atlassian · 6 min read· Apr 7, 2022 -- People illustrations by Storyset Cross-discipline collaboration can be challenging. Especially if your team is remote or taking a hybrid approach to time in the office, it can be easy to fall into a rhythm of validation. Collaboration, in…
Published intech-at-instacart · 9 min read· Jul 31, 2018 -- Two years ago, the customer engineering team at Instacart began working on a new API for our customer-facing apps. We took a look at our existing API, which was a traditional data API, and found that we were implementing a lot of domain…
Our 20th most-read article of 2024. - - - “Mr. Trump’s first term was better than expected… the authoritarian rule that Democrats and the press predicted never appeared. Mr. Trump was too undisciplined, and his attention span too short, to stay on one message much less stage a coup. America’s checks…
We don’t self-identify as software developers but as web developers, backend developers, Android developers, or iOS developers. Many factors reinforce this specialization. I’m a Droid Building systems builds experience. Android developers learn technologies that have no analog on other platforms:…
I’m writing this post about eighteen hours before the first polls open on Election Day, and it feels tense out there. The New York Times, for example, just posted an article headlined: “How Americans
Sustainable travel—meaning the share of trips by walking, cycling, and public transport—is one measure of the health of a transport system. By that measure, taking Chennai as an example, sustainable t
The One About Scallion Pancakes Published on May 10, 2024 I have a weird story about scallion pancakes. It goes like this. Around this time last year, I was walking down my street in San Francisco whe
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