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

A curated list of openbsd’s innovations

Think about all the things they’ve told you that you 𝑛𝑒𝑒𝑑. HTML is NOT the answer!

source: https://hackers.town/@lmorchard/109444911452419131

Paul Baran (born Pesach Baran /ˈbærən/; April 29, 1926 – March 26, 2011) was a Polish-American engineer who was a pioneer in the development of computer networks. He was one of the two independent inventors of packet switching.

source: book; where wizards stay up late

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.

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.

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

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?”.

What happens inside the cpu? how things get delayed...

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.

In this article, we provide a holistic view of the Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) abstractions by a systematic review of their historical evolution. We discuss some of the key factors that drove the evolution and identify the pitfalls that make them infeasible when building modern applications.

source: https://www.usenix.org

The really, really short answer is that you should not. The somewhat longer answer is that just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the color they plan to paint it. This is a metaphor indicating that you need not argue about every little feature just because you know enough to do so. Some people have commented that the amount of noise generated by a change is inversely proportional to the complexity of the change.

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

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.

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.