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

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.

This is an attempt to stop a war. I hope it is not too late and that somehow, magically perhaps, peace will prevail again.

The latecomers into the arena believe that the issue is: “What is the proper byte order in messages?”.

It’s hard to believe, looking at the modern computing world, but there is still more to life than Windows or Unix… and today, most of the alternatives run on vanilla x86 hardware and are free.

a. Learn to learn
b. Learn to question things
c. Acquire the permanent habit of learning

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.

Lawrence Gilman Roberts (December 21, 1937 – December 26, 2018) was an American engineer...

As a program manager and later office director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency, Roberts and his team created the ARPANET using packet switching techniques invented by British computer scientist Donald Davies and American Paul Baran.

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.

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

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.

A curated list of openbsd’s innovations

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

source: queue.acm.org

People who know what they are doing run FreeBSD! Everyone in the communication industry run FreeBSD!

source: unixsheikh

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

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

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