Vivian Voss

A measurement sheet for kqueue, the event notification interface Jonathan Lemon introduced in FreeBSD 4.1 in July 2000 and presented at USENIX in 2001.

Type umask into a shell on a FreeBSD system and it answers 0022, a value set at line 49 of /etc/login.conf that nobody now working with the machine chose, and which means every new file arrives as -rw-r--r-- and is readable by every account on it.

A company kept its entire customer list in a database application a teenager had assembled in a school computer course, and fifteen years later the machine died, the operating system would not install on anything purchasable, and the data had to be rescued

A measurement of the claim that clean, fast software distribution requires an ecosystem of image format, registry, daemon and orchestrator.

The complete /etc/rc.conf of a FreeBSD host carrying a dozen jails, several websites, a firewall and a ZFS pool comes to eleven lines and 285 bytes, and sh -n passes on it because the file is a shell script assigning variables rather than a configuration…

Engage is a 64 kilobyte intro by Logicoma, released on 15 April 2017 at Revision in Saarbruecken, with code by ferris and Darth Shader, graphics and direction by ferris, and music by wobble and h0ffman.

A measurement sheet for periodic(8), the FreeBSD base system utility that runs maintenance and security scripts on a schedule and posts the result to root.

In the budget round of a house that runs FreeBSD, an engineer brings a single page saying that the logs already go through syslogd, the metrics sit in the kernel counters, the firewall is pf and the storage is ZFS.

Prime Video built its audio and video monitoring out of small serverless pieces coordinated by a state machine, passing frames through an object store, and hit a hard scaling wall at roughly five per cent of the intended load.

A measurement run in a FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE jail rolled back to a golden snapshot, host load 0.10 at the start.

Sun Microsystems built NFS in 1984 to solve what was mostly a furniture problem: engineers moved between workstations and their files did not move with them.

Bytes of Art portrays Rupture by Andromeda Software Development, released 11 April 2009 and first in the demo competition at The Gathering in Hamar with 539 points against 403 for second place in a field of ten.

Technical Beauty Scope measures WireGuard from the FreeBSD side, where pkg which finds neither the wg tool nor the if_wg kernel module because both arrive with the base system rather than as a package.

IT Philosophy examines the assumption the whole industry stands on and nobody defends out loud: that trust is transitive.

Lean Software audits the alarm business.

The Bench Marker, measuring the best-told legend of the past decade: isolation used to be heavy, Docker made it light, and light means free.

Unix Universe, on the two grains of isolation that FreeBSD ships in its base system and on the standing complaint that jails are too coarse to confine a single process.

Bytes of Art, on Offscreen Colonies, the 64 kilobyte intro by the Hungarian group Conspiracy that took first place in the PC 64k competition at Revision 2015.

Technical Beauty Scope, the measured second look at tools this site has admired before.

IT Philosophy, on what the word free means once a licence starts asking for things.

Lean Software, on the web framework that solved a problem the web framework had caused and on the repair that now runs on somebody else's estate.

The Bench Marker, on errors that arrive without a shape and on the people expected to catch them.

Unix Universe, on silent data corruption and the architectural decision behind ZFS.

Bytes of Art, a portrait of f07, the Function 2007 invitation demo by the Hungarian group Conspiracy, released on 5 August 2007.

IT Philosophy, on the category behind the job title Linux Administrator.

Lean Software, an audit of the Docker Desktop subscription.

The Bench Marker, on what a build pipeline spends before it reaches any product code.

Unix Universe, on dynamic instrumentation and what it costs not to use it.

Bytes of Art, a portrait of Laevitas, a Windows demo by the Swedish group Bitbendaz released on 15 August 2020.

IT Philosophy, an examination of the sentence used to end technical discussions.

Lean Software, an examination of what a dependency scanner actually answers and what it cannot.

The Bench Marker, a measurement of cloud cost against rented iron for a steady workload.

Unix Universe, on source package systems and where a hardening decision actually lives.

Bytes of Art.

A thesis on what a code review approval actually proves.

An accounting of the strongest argument for keeping a build step in the browser, which is that whoever owns the build step also owns the cache invalidation, and that a browser may notice a raw file has changed while an optimised import is left exactly as…

A measurement of what desktop applications weigh before they start, taken on one Mac running macOS 26.5.2 using du, with the bundled runtime measured separately from the application's own code and the bundled Chromium version read out of the framework bin…

A ladder of four answers to the question of what should happen when software needs other software, and a fifth position below its first rung.

1995 is a PC demo by Kewlers and mfx, two Finnish groups who pooled their people for it, released on 5 August 2006 at Assembly in Helsinki.

IT Philosophy, a thesis on the social evaluation penalty for AI use.

Lean Software, a cost audit of the decision that a website must be compiled before it may be a website.

Unix Universe, the fourth and last of The Unix Family.

IT Philosophy, the third and last of three Sundays on what we can no longer read.

Bytes of Art returns, first of the reopened Saturday series. 0mix, by the Japanese scener 0b5vr, is a 64K intro: a seven-minute techno live set, music and moving image at once, running at 140 BPM in a browser tab from sixty-four kilobytes of code.

The BSD Field Guide, first of three on The Ground.

Lean Software, the sixth of eighteen Wednesdays on how we got here, and the first of five on npm, the registry read as a business. npm began in January 2010 as a small tool for fetching JavaScript packages from a registry anyone could write to, and that o…

Unix Universe, the third of four portraits of the Unix family, the outsider with none of the blood.

IT Philosophy, the second of three Sundays on what we can no longer read, one layer beneath the code you did not write.

Security Review, the third and last of three Fridays on what makes a server operating system dependable, and the close of the Boring on Purpose series.

Lean Software, the fifth of eighteen Wednesdays on how we got here, and the close of the diagnosis.