It’s late August, 1918. Woodrow Wilson is in the middle of his second term and over the next hundred days the German lines on the western front of WW1 will buckle under the weight of nearly 2 million fresh American … Read more
I have a small solar farm and the panels have got visibly dusty. Is cleaning them worthwhile? How much difference does it make? Let’s find out. I know that my panels have not been cleaned in the last year. I … Read more
Let’s say you’re writing an image processing program. The program takes in an image, converts it to floating point, does some processing and finally saves the modified pixels to disk as 8-bit colors. The question today concerns how exactly the … Read more
I am Philip—an engineer working at Distr, which helps software and AI companies distribute their applications to self-managed environments. Our Open Source Software Distribution platform is available on GitHub (github.com/distr-sh/distr) and orchestrates both Docker Compose and Docker Swarm deployments on … Read more
Should engineering organizations have quality assurance (QA)? A lot of engineering leaders say they should not. I review the topic, and provide some suggestions for QA leaders, and some nuance on the problems with the way QA and engineering work … Read more
A decision framework for founders who want leverage, not vibes I’ve been asked a few times about my approach to open-source in the past few weeks, so decided to write this article to structure my thoughts. Most founders get the … Read more
Framing our phones as glossy portraits of the world comes at a cost: we spend more time gazing instead of gaining utility. Photo by Mihail Ilchov / Unsplash “Is the picture going to appear in black & white?” asks a … Read more
As various LLMs become more and more popular, so does comments with “I asked Gemini, and Gemini said ….”. While the guidelines were written (and iterated on) during a different time, it seems like it might be time to have … Read more
As a Ph.D. candidate studying green jays in Texas, Stokes was in the habit of monitoring several social media sites where birders share photos of their sightings. It was one of several ways he located birds to trap, take blood … Read more
Image by Annie Ruygt Some concepts are easy to grasp in the abstract. Boiling water: apply heat and wait. Others you really need to try. You only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one. … Read more