A long time ago someone sent me an article, maybe it was from Harvard Business Review, that talked about the four things that might motivate...| apenwarr.ca
For a long time I referred to Google as the Programmer Black Hole: my favourite programmers get sucked in, and they never come out again. M...| apenwarr.ca
The other day, talking to some people from IBM in Raleigh, I learned a bit about businessspeak. You know, the strange language involving &q...| apenwarr.ca
Hmm, it seems the expected flamewar is flaming even better than expected. hub chimes in to say that power management has been working just...| apenwarr.ca
Here's a post I've been thinking about for a while. I shared it privately with a few people last year, but wanted to find a way to present...| apenwarr.ca
I've seen several articles in the past with titles like "Top 10 things you didn't know about bash programming." These articles are disappoin...| apenwarr.ca
These three programming environment "features" all have one characteristic in common that makes them bad: non-repeatability. If you run the...| apenwarr.ca
I have a friend who exited his startup a few years ago and is now rich. How rich is unclear. One day, we were discussing ways to expedite th...| apenwarr.ca
"Systems design" is a branch of study that tries to find universal architectural patterns that are valid across disciplines. You might thin...| apenwarr.ca
I spend a lot of time answering various people's tech-business questions. Occasionally, I will say something that sounds brilliant, and an...| apenwarr.ca
It seems my previous article on bufferbloat struck a chord with some people. Most people, quite rightly, didn't know what to do with it and...| apenwarr.ca
Back in the early 2000s, XML was all the rage. An unusual evolution from HTML, which itself was an evolution (devolution?) from SGML, XML w...| apenwarr.ca
Reading about bitcoin. Thought about writing a blog rant, but "OMG they're all totally crazy" wasn't long enough, so here we are. Filler.&nb...| apenwarr.ca
Our company recently announced a fundraise. We were grateful for all the community support, but the Internet also raised a few of its colle...| apenwarr.ca
[Note 2017-12-29: the news.ycombinator.com discussion of this post is unusually useful. You may want to read it first.] [Note 2018-09-01:...| apenwarr.ca
Back when I was in university, I visited a bookstore and found, in the physics section, a group of books on relativity. One of the shortest...| apenwarr.ca
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a statistically questionable way to turn a set of 10-point ratings into a single number you can compare with...| apenwarr.ca
A few conversations last week made me realize I use the word “interesting” in an unusual way. I rely heavily on mental models. Of course, e...| apenwarr.ca
tl;dr: Rebuilding a target because its mtime is older than the mtimes of its dependencies, like `make` does, is very error prone. redo does...| apenwarr.ca
I really like the "tech debt" metaphor. A lot of people don't, but I think that's because they either don't extend the metaphor far enough,...| apenwarr.ca
Someone asked if I could write about the rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) and what I think that means for the future of people, t...| apenwarr.ca
Recently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hund...| apenwarr.ca
What if all these weird tech trends actually add up to something? Last time, we explored why various bits of trendy technology are, in my o...| apenwarr.ca
Welcome to this week's edition of "building a startup in 2020," in which all your meetings are suddenly remote, and you probably weren't pre...| apenwarr.ca
I guess I know something about train wrecks. One night when I was 10 years old, me and my mom were driving home. We came to a train crossin...| apenwarr.ca