Did Ken, Dennis, and Brian choose wrong with NUL-terminated text strings?

source: communications of the acm

Meaningful problems are the most valuable human motivators. Made-up problems are a blight. Ensure you have not quite enough time and people available to tackle the former lest you start inventing the latter.

source: dhh

Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.

source: dhh

this collection of thoughts on software development gathered by grug brain developer

grug brain developer not so smart, but grug brain developer program many long year and learn some things although mostly still confused

Plan 9 was intended to be Unix, done better. It preemptively replaced a lot of what we now bodge together with virtual machines, containers, and even microkernels, and it did it more simply and cleanly. But it wasn’t compatible enough to replace its ancestor. With off-the-shelf existing 21st century tech, we can fix that.

source: fosdem2024

Monolith vs microservices ... small server vs big server...

We have all gotten so familiar with virtualization and abstractions between our software and the servers that run it. These days, “serverless” computing is all the rage, and even “bare metal” is a class of virtual machine. However, every piece of software runs on a server. Since we now live in a world of virtualization, most of these servers are a lot bigger and a lot cheaper than we actually think.

There is something special in simple code. Here I’m not referring to simplicity to fight complexity or over engineering, but to simplicity per se, auto referential, without goals if not beauty, understandability and elegance.

Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider (/ˈlɪklaɪdər/; March 11, 1915 – June 26, 1990), known simply as J. C. R. or “Lick”, was an American psychologist[2] and computer scientist .... He is particularly remembered for being one of the first to foresee modern-style interactive computing and its application to all manner of activities; and also as an Internet pioneer with an early vision of a worldwide computer network long before it was built

source: book; where wizards stay up late

Talk from Andrew Kelley about data oriented design and how it can help to reduce memory footprint from workload with careful design.

* Décongestion de réseaux
* Débuggage de logiciels
* Protection contre les virus
* Protection contre les tentatives d’intrusions
* Restructuration de services
* Partage de connexion Internet sans connexion
* Suppression aléatoire de compte utilisateur
* Protection anti-spoofing basée sur les adresses MAC
* Définition de politique de gestion et de sécurité aléatoire
* Elimination systématique des fichiers de log (journaux)
* Protection contre les DoS et DDoS grâce au système exclusif InUranus®
* Support de IPoT
* Rend vos données importantes accessibles à tout moment et à tout endroit
* Débloque les claviers qui se bl

source: CaptainPatate

Long ago, as the design of the Unix file system was being worked out, the entries . and .. appeared, to make navigation easier....

Architecture is hard sometimes--people keep offering up some new idea that quickly becomes the mainstream “way to do it” without any context or nuance, and the industry, desperate to find ways to improve their architecture, snaps it up without hesitation. Microservices was the latest in the trend, and it’s time we dissected the idea and got to the real root of what’s going on.

source: CaptainPatate

Architecture is hard sometimes--people keep offering up some new idea that quickly becomes the mainstream “way to do it” without any context or nuance, and the industry, desperate to find ways to improve their architecture, snaps it up without hesitation. Microservices was the latest in the trend, and it’s time we dissected the idea and got to the real root of what’s going on.

source: https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/how_big_should_a_programming_language_be.html

There are hackers—believe it or not—who just love the art of building software. They do it for the challenge, for the fun of it. They aren’t trying to make a million dollars.

Writing is key to have impact in large organizations. As a senior software engineer chances are that writing is the most important skill you have to acquire in order to increase your scope beyond the team and advance your career.

This article contains some learnings that have helped the author to become better and more productive as a writer over the past 15 years.

source: dragonflydigest

What is the even loop and how it is supposed to work?

Make something. Participate in something. Engage with someone. All of it might feel as unnatural as strapping on those running shoes after too long of a break, but once you’re back to creating, the energy comes by itself.