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The dispassionate developer
Caring for your craft is fine, but should you work for free?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,497 posts.
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Substack's UI and 1Password temporarily cost me $2k
An event-tech partner for ambitious experiential teams.
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Early-Retirement Update
I’ve had a difficult time finding a way to create a new entry on a blog that has essentially been dead since 2015. Yet, I have had a persistent feeling that I owe my readers an update.
2706
Sovereign writers and Substack
Substack is at the center of media controversy, most of which misses the point that sovereign writers — not Substack — are in control.
2707
The ecosystem of the Go programming language
Go is one of the most prominent general-purpose programming languages nowadays. Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Adobe, to name a few, have been using the language extensively. It’s the language of choice behind multiple cloud computing projects such as Kubernetes, and it’s steadily expanding towards numerous…
2708
Scala projects are difficult to maintain
Scala is a powerful programming language that can make certain small teams hyper-productive.
2709
Don't End the Week with Nothing (2014)
A bit of inspiration (and some hopefully actionable advice) for folks who are still working at day jobs.
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Reverse-Engineering NES Tetris to Add Hard Drop
Tetris for the NES is one of my favourite versions of Tetris. My only complaint is that it lacks the ability to “hard drop” - instantly dropping the current piece and locking it into place.
2712
The world needs a software bill of materials
“Sunburst” was the most sophisticated hack the world has ever seen. One of the most urgent lessons so far learned from the attack: we need…
2713
When you have too much memory for SheepShaver
When I first got my 133MHz BeBox (not new, sadly), it had "only" 32MB of memory and it had four more SIMM slots to fill. While Be only off...
2714
Building My Own Yahoo Pipes
Pipes has been dead since 2015 or so, but I used it for a long time and it was essential to my daily news intake, so I’ve been building a personal ...
2715
Cryptography behind the top cryptocurrencies
This table is based on research at Nash for work expanding our MPC protocol to secure wallets on new blockchains. We took a snapshot of rankings by market cap in early February 2021. In summary, 74 coins use ECDSA and the secp256k1 curve, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, and 48 ERC20 tokens. 10 coins use EdDSA and…
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Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore
Nobody designs for small iPhone devices anymore. Why do I say this? Well, if you've been rocking the iPhone SE 2020 you would know. What I'm saying is there a lot of UI glitches from apps running on iPhone SE. Clubhouse Forgot to measure the screen's width? Spotify I can't see the Refresh button. I…
2720
The Invention of a New Pasta Shape
For the past three years, Dan Pashman of The Sporkful podcast has been on something of a mission: to invent a new pasta shape. All of Pashman’s hard work has pa
2721
Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface
One of the most popular arguments against Emacs is that it is “a great operating system, lacking only a decent editor”. The promotion of the idea of “Living in Emacs” by some of the hardcore Emacs users only make this argument more compelling. At the first glance, using a single program for “everything” does seem to…
2722
A working D compiler on OpenBSD
I got GDC , the GNU D Compiler, working on OpenBSD . Supporting D has been a very long time coming. Here's the story of how we got here and where we need to go next.
2723
Safari is now probably the influential wild card browser for user privacy
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
2724
Cranelift, Part 3: Correctness in Register Allocation
This post is the last in a three-part series about Cranelift . In the first post , I covered overall context and the instruction-selection problem; in the second post , I took a deep dive into compiler performance via careful algorithmic design.
2725
System Shock
We approached games as immersive simulations. We wanted to build game environments that reacted to player’s decisions, that behaved in natural ways, and where players had more verbs than simply “shoot.” DOOM was not an influence on System Shock. We were trying something more difficult and nuanced, [although] we still…
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What I wish I knew before building a Shopify App
I spent the last week building an App for the Shopify Marketplace. It was unlike anything I've done before on the Web. Knowing some of the things I'm going to share, before you start building, could save you some headache.
2728
Senior Engineers Build Consensus (2019)
To be an effective senior engineer, you need to convince others to help you execute.
2729
Outgrowing Software
When software eats the world, the questions that matter stop being software questions.
2730
A Mind Is Born (2017)
Making a demo in just 256 bytes would be a formidable challenge regardless of platform. A Mind Is Born is my attempt to do it on the Commodore 64. In the absence of an actual 256-byte compo, it was submitted to the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017 , where it ended up on 1st place.