Makura no Soshi

• The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think
  One of usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. […] You can do it; 92%–95% of the population can’t.
• Towards an understanding of technical debt
  Technical debt exists. But it’s relatively rare. […] The term is being abused, or at least dangerously overloaded.
• Developer hiring and the market for lemons
  The fact that joining a new team is uncertain makes developers less likely to leave existing teams, which makes it harder to hire developers. But the fact that developers often join teams which they dislike makes it easier to hire developers. What’s the net effect of that? I have no idea.
• Bots won’t replace apps. Better apps will replace apps.
  Lately, everyone’s talking about “conversational UI.” It’s the next big thing. But the more articles I read on the topic, the more annoyed I get. It’s taken me so long to figure out why!
• Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns
  In the Kingdom of Javaland, where King Java rules with a silicon fist, people aren’t allowed to think the way you and I do. In Javaland, you see, nouns are very important, by order of the King himself. Nouns are the most important citizens in the Kingdom.
• Graphical fidelity is ruining video games / fuzzy notepad
  So my problem is that striving for realism is incredibly boring and counter-productive. I don’t even understand the appeal; if I wanted reality, I could look out my window.

• Trump, Putin and the Pipelines to Nowhere
  A crisis in investor confidence is the biggest threat to fossil fuel companies — not environmentalists, regulations, clean energy competitors or climate agreements.
• The 1930s were humanity’s darkest, bloodiest hour. Are you paying attention?
  Even to mention the 1930s is to evoke the period when human civilisation entered its darkest, bloodiest chapter. No case needs to be argued; just to name the decade is enough. It is a byword for mass poverty, violent extremism and the gathering storm of world war.
• When It’s Too Late to Stop Fascism, According to Stefan Zweig
  The excruciating power of Zweig’s memoir lies in the pain of looking back and seeing that there was a small window in which it was possible to act, and then discovering how suddenly and irrevocably that window can be slammed shut.
• Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria
  When the library at Alexandria burned it was said to be an “international catastrophe.” When the most significant humanities project of our time was dismantled in court, the scholars, archivists, and librarians who’d had a hand in its undoing breathed a sigh of relief, for they believed, at the time, that they had narrowly averted disaster.
• Die Globale Klasse – Eine andere Welt ist möglich. Aber als Drohung.
  Es gibt heute eine globalisierte Klasse der Informationsarbeiter, der die meisten von uns angehören und die viel homogener und mächtiger ist, als sie denkt.
• Wie politisch darf, soll oder muss eine Firma sein?
  In kleinen und großen Gruppen sind wir auf der ganzen Welt und in unterschiedlichsten Kulturkreisen unterwegs. Die Vorbehaltlosigkeit und das Interesse, welches uns überall entgegengebracht wird, hat auch jeder andere verdient. Und dafür stehen wir als Open Source Company in besonderem Maße.

• Learning From A Year of Security Breaches
  A theme in this article will be: what separates standard incidents from horrifying nightmares?
• I Peeked Into My Node_Modules Directory And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next
  It’s time we as a community stand up and say enough is enough, this community belongs to all of us, and not just a handful of JavaScript developers with great hair.
• Python FAQ : Why should I use Python 3? / fuzzy notepad
  Well, here I am, standing up for Python 3. I write all my new code in Python 3 now — because Python 3 is great and you should use it. Here’s why.
• Ruby in Production: Lessons Learned
  Having deployed a variety of Ruby apps (Rails and non-Rails) over the course of many years, here are some lessons I’ve learned to keep things afloat.
• The good and bad in Apple’s new APFS file system: A ZFS developer’s analysis
  APFS will be an improvement at stability for Apple users of all kinds, on every device. There are some clear wins and some missed opportunities.
• Dark corners of Unicode / fuzzy notepad
  So here is a collection of curiosities I’ve encountered in dealing with Unicode that you generally only find out about through experience. Enjoy.

On programming…

• The hardest problem in computer science
  …is, of course, naming. […] We can’t even agree on names for basic concepts.
• Know Thy Complexities!
  This webpage covers the space and time Big-O complexities of common algorithms used in Computer Science.
• Let’s stop copying C / fuzzy notepad
  The popularity of C has led to a number of programming languages’ taking significant cues from its design, and parts of its design are… slightly questionable.
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About CSVs
  Partially as a companion piece to my recent post about how CSV is an encoding nightmare, and partially an expression of frustration, I’ve decided to make a list of falsehoods programmers believe about CSVs.
• Parsing: an expanded timeline
  After five decades of parsing theory, the state of the art seems to be back where it started.
• explainshell.com
  write down a command-line to see the help text that matches each argument

A few notes on monitoring, debugging, and testing.

• Chris’s Wiki : blog/unix/ManyLoadAveragesOfUnix
  It turns out that the meaning of ‘load average’ on Unixes is rather more divergent than I thought it was. So here’s the story as I know it.
• Illustrated Guide to Monitoring and Tuning the Linux Networking Stack: Receiving Data
  This blog post expands on our previous blog post Monitoring and Tuning the Linux Networking Stack: Receiving Data with a series of diagrams aimed to help readers form a more clear picture of how the Linux network stack works.
• Using jemalloc to get to the bottom of a memory leak
  The opportunity to really get to the bottom of a memory problem is quite a rarity in the life of a developer and this showed in the fact that our investigations (alongside other work) lasted over a month.
• Ten Tired Trends In Software Testing Discourse
  I’ve read your blog posts and I’ve been to your talks and talked to you after the talks too. And here’s what I want to know: if you love automation so much how come all you can do is warn me about how not to use it?
• Notes on concurrency bugs
  Non-deterministic bugs are rare, but they can be extremely hard to debug and they’re a productivity killer. Bad non-deterministic bugs take so long to debug that relatively large investments in tools and prevention can be worth it.
• Why Writing Correct Software Is Hard
  The cost of correctness – like the energy cost of reducing entropy – is a result of the “natural laws” of computation, that cannot possibly be avoided.

More stuff on cloud and service architecture.

• A dissection of our favorite folk architecture
  I’m fascinated by the lore and mystery behind microservices. As a concept, microservices feels like one of the most interesting folk architectures of the modern era. It’s useful enough to be applied widely across different usage patterns and also vague enough to mean many different things.
• DevOps vs SRE: delayed coverage of the dumbest war
  I’m not personally pissed off by the google SRE book, actually, just a little bemused at how legitimately unaware they seem to be about … anything else that the industry has been doing over the past 10 years.
• Stack Overflow: A Technical Deconstruction
  One of the reasons I love working at Stack Overflow is we’re allowed encouraged to talk about almost anything out in the open.
• The Children’s Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes
  Introducing Phippy, an intrepid little PHP app, and her journey to Kubernetes.
• So You Wanna Go On-prem Do Ya
  If you run a successful SaaS platform, at some point someone is going to come to you with the question: can I run it myself? If you’re considering offering a private version of your SaaS, this post might be for you.
• PCI Compliance in the Public IaaS Cloud: How I Did It
  Over the past few years, I have heard many folks assert that one can be a PCI-compliant merchant using public IaaS cloud, and I have heard just as many state that it’s not possible. In retrospect, I have found most of them – including myself – to be misinformed.
• Video, Keynote NDC Sydney 2016: “If I knew then what I know now…” – Scott Hanselman
  Do you know there are actually more Javascript frameworks than there are apps that use Javascript frameworks?

• What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists
  It began after I started as a teaching assistant at the department of physics. The first note was a classic – it proved Albert Einstein wrong. The second one solved the problem of quantum mechanics by dividing several equations through zero, a feat that supposedly explained non-determinism.
• How to Recruit – Rands in Repose
  Recruiting and engineering must have a symbolic force-multiple relationship because the work they do together – the work of building a healthy and productive team – defines the success of your team and your company.
• It’s Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings
  Daily stand-up meetings have become a common ritual of many teams, especially in Agile software development. However, there are many subtle details that distinguish effective stand-ups and a waste of time.
• The Ultimate Guide to Remote Standups
  Remote companies have a unique opportunity to create optimal work environments for their their employees. With a few tweaks, the standup format helps remote teams get more done, faster.
• Meditations Redux
  The company I helped start, DefenseStorm, just celebrated its second year […] I’m posting the lessons I’ve learned because I think they might be useful to others.
• Being A Developer After 40 — Free Code Camp
  Hi everyone, I am a forty-two years old self-taught developer, and this is my story.

Some food for political thought, ranging from the IT perspective to the global economy.

• What Amazon Learned From Microsoft
  SaaS is the new proprietary. Truly the AWS Console is this generation’s Visual Studio.
• What is Google Up To?
  This has led us to a curious but reasoned inference, that Google is not always acting as a business in the conventional capitalist sense. The company’s motives at times appear to have a broader agenda, better described in social, even artistic terms, rather than exclusively business terms.
• A lesson in social engineering: president debates
  There is no debate, there is only social engineering.
• America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny
  The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. […] And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
• How American Politics Went Insane
  Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It happened gradually—and until the U.S. figures out how to treat the problem, it will only get worse.
• The end of capitalism has begun
  Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours.
• The Age of Disorder
  Authoritarianism, mercantilism, and nationalism are beginning to replace democracy, capitalism, and internationalism.