Problem

It’s their families. The last 5 years, if not more, has seen the US and other countries like the UK gripped by the narrative that there’s a youth mental health crisis. That’s not actually true…there’s little evidence of a crisis … Read more

Last year, our team spent a lot of time interviewing fellow Platform, DevOps, DevEx, CI/CD, and SRE engineers, as well as engineering leaders, in order to better understand their day-to-day challenges. We began this effort to see how Earthfiles, one … Read more

Posted by Dylan Beattie on 11 April 2025 • permalink The whole “vibe coding” thing is another reminder that quite a lot of people working in tech don’t understand the difference between programs and products. To me, programs are “works … Read more

It’s confession time. I was a Y2K test manager for IBM. As far as some people are concerned that means I was party to a huge scam that allowed IT companies to make billions out of spooking poor deluded politicians … Read more

“The real difficulty with lying is that you have to keep track of all the lies that you’ve told, and to whom” is a quote I once read that I can’t definitively source (it’s… inconsistently attributed to Mark Twain). It’s … Read more

The problem with new URL(), and how URL.parse() fixes that As someone building a browser I need to parse a lot of URLs. Partially to validate them, but also to normalize them or get specific parts out of the URL. … Read more

 Cliff L. Biffle blogged a great write-up of a debugging odyssey at Oxide with the title Who killed the network switch? Here’s the bit that jumped out at me: At the time that code was written, it was correct, but … Read more

Software people are always all up in the XY problem: someone asks about how to do X when what they’re really trying to solve is Y. I find the YX problem much more frustrating: where software people decide that they … Read more