Blog & Notes

Spec-ulation Keynote by Rich Hickey. Food for thought.

E-Prime, an English dialect.

Neural Redis: “Machine learning is like highschool sex. Everyone says they do it, nobody really does, and no one knows what it actually is.” Mike Townsend

Alexa Meade, an interesting mixture of painting and reality.

Loading polyfills only when needed by Philip Walton of Google.

Gitless is an effort to improve the Git UI/workflow.

On Software developers and our (problematic) view of the world. Thank you Maciej. Again.

The MIT license, broken down line by line.

Envoy: A L7 proxy and communication bus with support for HTTP/2 (and gRPC).

rclone is rsync for Cloud storage.

Little Flocker is ransonware and spyware protection on the file level.

GNUplot is really awesome. And if you're a console guy, you might like it in combination with iterm2-imagetools.

webpack & HTTP/2 by Tobias Koppers, author of webpack.

PiBakery: The easiest way to setup your Rasperry Pi.

restic is an interesting backup solution. Combine that with minio.io.

“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.” - Carl Sagan

Technical analysis of client identification mechanisms, aka browser fingerprinting

Thomas Jefferson and Apple versus the FBI, by djb

Cartography comparison of Google Maps and Apple Maps.

“Eat, sleep, code, repeat” is such bullshit.

More Crows Than Eagles: Very good reads.

Vandadium, still under everyone's radar.

rqlite replicates SQLite databases using Raft. Interesting.

Alan Kay's reading list for students.

Bulma: A simple flexbox based layout. I expect to see many more in the near future.

Facebook: Too much medium, not enough message.

The Complexity of Simple is a rather welcome description of what's wrong with most products and services these days (and how to fix it).

BitBar puts the output of any program into your OS X menu bar.

“As long as the manager's prestige and power are tied to the size of his budget, he will be motivated to expand his organization. This is an inappropriate motive in the management of a system design activity. Once the organization exists, of course, it will be used. Probably the greatest single common factor behind many poorly designed systems now in existence has been the availability of a design organization in need of work.”—Melvin E. Conway in “How Do Committees Invent?”. Yes, the Conway of Conway's Law.

The Website Obesity Crisis in which Maciej introduces the Taft Test: “Does your page design improve when you replace every image with William Howard Taft?” By the way, this website is 156kB in total as I write this. That's 120kB of text and links, 1kB of CSS, and two images of 12kB and 22kb respectively. Sorry for the latter.

Happy new year! :-)

Command-line tools can be 235x faster than your Hadoop cluster.