From the time of Aristotle through to the 1500s, the dominant model of the universe had the sun, planets, and stars orbiting around the Earth. This simple model, however, did not match what could be seen in the skies. Venus … Read more
Yearly software development plans are my favourite genre of fiction. In the fabulous world of yearly plans, product developers assume they know exactly what product they must build and how long each task will take. There are two sub-genre of … Read more
Contents Everybody seems to disagree with everybody The different roles we play in online discourse Cultural differences mean everybody is operating under different rules of engagement My intent: stated as plainly as I can Paradigms, what the word actually means … Read more
tl;dr – Don’t chuck the Sony 1000XMs/AirPods just yet. Throat mics are an improvement over a standalone wired microphone (if that’s what you are using), and have better background noise reduction but in a quiet room your usual bluetooth headset … Read more
table of contents Photo by Martin Sanchez How often do your simple prototypes or ad-hoc scripts turn into fully-fledged applications? The simplicity of organic code growth has a flip side: it becomes too hard to maintain. The proliferation of dicts … Read more
Before I was a maintainer of open source software I was a user of open source software, and I sometimes behaved badly. While using some application or library I would discover a bug or something would break my workflow with … Read more
Early-stage startups shouldn’t run on Kubernetes yet. But eventually, growth-stage and large companies should be running on Kubernetes in some form. Kubernetes Maximalism doesn’t mean one-size-fits-all. Infrastructure should progressively grow with your workloads and team. How can you choose the … Read more
When I first started programming in Go, my summary of it was, “The good things are great and the bad things are weird and I can live with them.” After another three years and a few large projects in Go, … Read more
The recent LaMDA outcry reinforces something that’s been rattling around in my brain for some time: most experts have no idea what they’re talking about. For those not in-the-know, a Google engineer recently interviewed one of their large language models … Read more
Good physical engineering crucially relies on redundancy, which is the property of multiple ways to ensure that something doesn’t go wrong. Such redundancy protects against expected and unexpected forms of failure. Software engineering also relies on introducing redundancy, and redundancy … Read more