apenwarr

Happy July 4th!

In recent months I've heard of several teams with an interesting policy: each pull request should be no more than a few files, and no more than a certain number of lines (say 500).

AI isn’t killing engineering.

AI is the cause of, and solution to, slop problems.

AI needs an open ‘Android’ to balance the vertically locked-in ‘iPhone’ of trillion-dollar AI companies.

AI is the universal translator that finally connects all your tools... into a hairball.

We’ve all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members.

Long ago in the 1990s when I was in high school, my chemistry+physics teacher pulled me aside.

I have a friend who exited his startup a few years ago and is now rich.

Our company recently announced a fundraise.

Treat AI agents like a naive, high-energy intern.

The Internet’s been broken since IPv6 stalled; Tailscale fixes it at the IP layer.

An executive with 8,000 indirect reports and 2000 hours of work in a year can afford to spend, at most, 15 minutes per year per person in their reporting hierarchy... even if they work on nothing else.

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a statistically questionable way to turn a set of 10-point ratings into a single number you can compare with other NPSes.

A few conversations last week made me realize I use the word “interesting” in an unusual way.

Someone asked if I could write about the rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) and what I think that means for the future of people, technology, society, and so on.

I really like the "tech debt" metaphor.

I just did a presentation at SREcon Conversations (which I call SREconcon) EMEA, called the "Curse of Unreasonably Sized Networks."

Recently a security hole in a certain open source Java library resulted in a worldwide emergency kerfuffle as, say, 40% of the possibly hundreds of millions of worldwide deployments of this library needed to be updated in a hurry.

What if all these weird tech trends actually add up to something?

The Internet has gotten too big.

Let me tell you about the still-not-defunct real-time log processing pipeline we built at my now-defunct last job.

Let's talk about bug/feature tradeoffs.

I guess I know something about train wrecks.

Welcome to this week's edition of "building a startup in 2020," in which all your meetings are suddenly remote, and you probably weren't prepared for it.

As a "fully remote work" company, we had to make some choices about the technologies we use to work together and stay in touch.

"Systems design" is a branch of study that tries to find universal architectural patterns that are valid across disciplines.

No.

A few years ago I wrote The World in Which IPv6 was a Good Design.

Long ago, I wrote git-subtree to work around some of my annoyances with git submodules.

I made a little flow chart of mainstream programming languages and how programmers seem to move from one to another.

I was recently recommended to read the book Accidental Empires by Robert X.

Multi-factor authentication remains hard-to-use, hard-to-secure, and error-prone.

I don't mind letting your programs see my private data as long as I get something useful in exchange.

Back in the early 2000s, XML was all the rage.

I've been working on a series of tutorials using redo for various use cases.

From a book I've been reading: Power is certainly important, particularly in dictatorships, in places where constitutions, laws, unwritten rules, traditions and understandings don't count.

A while ago I was discussing hiring plans with a co-founder of a recently-funded startup.

[Note 2017-12-29: the news.ycombinator.com discussion of this post is unusually useful.

I recently decided to switch my laptop from a Macbook to a Chromebook, partly because Apple's keyboards are so terrible lately, and partly because ChromeOS is suddenly useful now that they invented Crostini.

tl;dr: Rebuilding a target because its mtime is older than the mtimes of its dependencies, like make does, is very error prone. redo does it better, and so can you.

I'm working on (statistically speaking) my least interesting work in years.

Lately I've been getting back to hacking on my djb redo implementation.

Here's a post I've been thinking about for a while.

I updated my SWE simulator[1] from a few weeks ago.

My parents live in a rural area, where the usual monopolist Internet service provider provides the usual monopolist Internet service: DSL, really far from the exchange point, very very asymmetric, and with insanely oversized buffers (ie. bufferbloat), esp…

I spend a lot of time answering various people's tech-business questions.

One of the dangers of working at a big company that does a little bit of everything, even if that big company has a pretty open culture, is it's really hard to remember which things are still secret and which have been released.

keep posting about.

, you will need to go through a montage of embarrassing and destructive mistakes as you learn to use those superpowers.