Defaults matter, and don’t be cute Never underestimate the power of defaults. It’s true that customization is important. The ability to change things prevents small incompatibilities from making ...

Standards are like pizza. Even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good. Standards are wonderful. They avoid ambiguity and conflict, they simplify interactions between systems and people. But ...

Has functional programming gone too far? This is a brief discussion of a snippet of code from a more junior member of my team that perplexed me when I first read it. I’m sharing it in part becaus...

Macs have the best, and worst, defaults I use a Mac because it offers an unbeatable laptop experience, and with the ARM64 hardware is now powerful enough I just dock it instead of using a desktop...

Digital erosion is equally pernicious The world is beset on all sides by bad documentation. It’s hard to overstate the scale of the issue. How much human effort is squandered every day stumbling ...

Why use many host when few host do trick? Right now, there’s something wrong at your job. An obvious gap, an inefficiency, a lesser of evils. Often they arise as the lack of integration between d...

If your code doesn’t work, no one cares how quickly it doesn’t work Proper instrumentation is the only way to up the number of 9’s in your reliability, understand your customers, and reduce the m...

The Rust compiler is proving a negative Rust’s claim to fame is that it allows low level access while still guaranteeing memory safety. In other words, the compiler is proving the non-existence o...

Incentives are everything Human beings are social animals that are inherently self interested. If you disagree, you’re just wrong. For all its faults, there’s a reason capitalism has become domin...

Measurements are always proxies There’s a common adage that once a metric becomes a target, it ceases to have any value as a measurement. That’s not what we’re here to discuss today but it share ...