Today’s public incident writeup comes courtesy of Brendan Humphries, the CTO of Canva. Like so many other incidents that came before, this is another tale of saturation, where the failure mode involves overload. There’s a lot of great detail in Humpries’s write-up, and I recommend you read it…

TL;DR: We built a browser-based terminal controller working around 24 hours using Claude Code, named pipes, and Xterm.js. No SSH needed, just open your browser and start typing. Check and command your agents on the go! What happens when three developers lock themselves in a room for around 24 hours…

I’ve been reviewing other people’s code for a while now, more than two decades to be precise. Nowadays, I spend around 50-70% of my time reviewing code in some form or another. It’s what I get paid to do, alongside systems design. Over time, I learned a thing or two about how to review code…

Listen to this post: Good morning, Today’s Stratechery Interview is with Cloudflare co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince. Prince took a fascinating path to Silicon Valley — which we explore in this interview — but is most well-known for Cloudflare, which he started at Harvard Business School in 2009.…

I feel like the ground is shifting beneath my feet. Several times in the last few weeks I’ve seen people I respect talk about how they use a generative AI assistant when coding, or criticize those that are critical of generative AI. People who were, themselves, critical of generative AI in recent…

written on July 30, 2025 Using Claude Code and other agentic coding tools has become all the rage. Not only is it getting millions of downloads, but these tools are also gaining features that help streamline workflows. As you know, I got very excited about agentic coding in May, and I’ve tried many…

Over the past few years I’ve written a lot about the cloud, and what it means for Europe. Here I want to pull the various articles together into a coherent story. Note, nothing of what follows is in any way novel or original. While the facts presented in the articles are pretty inconvenient and in…

Open source funding has been a long standing issue, and something that I have been working on for almost 15 years now. Historically the sustainability model that has worked the best is: Publish open source and get a lot of users Put advertising on your website, docs, and other web properties Let…

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…