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Why I Don't Use React Router
Tech blog of topics that interest me - frontend development, functional programming, user experience, building cool things
Investing for Geeks
A quick, opinionated guide to retirement planning and investing for software people.
The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek
This post used to contain an early version of the introduction to my previous book, The Programmer’s Guide to a Sane Workweek. I’m now working on an updated iteration.
Why the Apple II ProDOS 2.4 Release Is the OS News of the Year
In September of 2016, a talented programmer released his own cooked update to a major company’s legacy operating system, purely because it needed to be done. A raft of new features, wrap-in p…
Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data
In the previous Xerox Alto restoration session , we got the disk working, but the system didn't boot. After much investigation, I discove...
Old Geek
I’m one. We’re not exactly common on the ground; my profession, apparently not content with having excluded a whole gender, is mostly doing without the services of a couple of generations.
To the 4 white male policemen who beat me for checking the health of [detainee]
You may or may not know that the incidence and relapse rates of schizophrenia in African-Caribbean males in Western countries has been…
Introducing OpenType Variable Fonts
“” is published by John Hudson in VariableFonts.io.
Five Months of Kubernetes
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Reverse Voxsplaining: Drugs vs. Chairs
[Content note: this is pretty much a rehash of things I’ve said before, and that other people have addressed much more eloquently. My only excuse for wasting your time with it again is that S…
Why are Adults so busy?
As a kid, I'd always wonder what it was about adults that made them so busy. What could they be possibly doing with all their time? After I (kinda) became one, it hit me. There's an alarmingly large list of things adults do that we never quite grasp until we're there.
Switching Costs in Software Development
The story of why it is important to make sure that it is easy to switch from one service to another.
Welcome to Rands Leadership Slack
For a role as crucial as leadership, there is a shocking lack of required training on the topic. Combined with a tremendous collection of impenetrable literatur
Weirdly broken Wi-Fi access points
And how to work around one kind on Mac OSX
Restoring YC's Xerox Alto, Day 6: Fixed a chip, data read from disk
In today's Xerox Alto restoration session we investigated why the disk drive isn't working and found a failed chip. With this chip repaire...
If your code accepts URIs as input, filter out “file://”
There are many online sites that accept reading input from remote locations. For example a site might try to extract all the text from a webpage, or show you the HTTP-headers a given server sends back in response to a request.
Why there is no Facebook killer: the death of the P2P dream (2014)
This is why we don't have a Facebook killer, and why we won't. We might have a 'better' Facebook, but it will still be a Facebook.
How Not to Bomb Your Offer Negotiation
So you know the first 6 rules. You’ve maneuvered through the initial offer conversation, you’ve lined up counteroffers from other companies, and now it’s time to move into the actual negotiating. N...
Iran’s exceptional reaction to 9/11 attacks (2015)
“Iran’s sympathetic response to the American tragedy has been exceptional for a country under US economic siege for two decades. Only hours after the Sept. 11 attack, President Muhammad…
Let's Build a Simple Interpreter, Part 1 (2015)
“If you don’t know how compilers work, then you don’t know how computers work. If you’re not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don’t know how they work.” — Steve Yegge There you have it. Think about it. It doesn’t really matter …