Let me get this straight. We have an emulator for 1985 hardware that was written in a pretty new language (Go), ported to a language that isn’t even 1.0 (Nim), compiled to C, then compiled to JavaScript? And the damn thing actually works? That’s kind of amazing.
I’m assuming, if you are on the Internet and reading kind of a nerdy blog, that you know what Unicode is. At the very least, you have a very general understanding of it — maybe “it’s what gives us emoji”. That’s about as far as most people’s understanding extends, in my experience, even among programmers. And that’s a…
I’ve been using the Internet in one form or another since the mid-80’s. In that time, I’ve seen a lot of strange stuff happening on our global network. On Tuesday, I experienced something extraordinary. It all started with a text message from my partner Ged at 8:30 AM: Mail server down. Please take a look […]
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
David Thomas's website.
Turns out, you don’t need a car to see America.
The git repo as art.
Dual_EC was almost certainly an NSA backdoor. Extended Random is the TLS extension that would have made it practical to exploit. Did NSA plant that one too? A look at the evidence.
Some thoughts on why git’s complex user interface works so well in practice.
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Read it on alexvking.com
Subtypes and supertypes are a common part of modern programming. Covariance and contravariance tell us where subtypes are accepted and where supertypes are accepted in place of the original type. This shows up frequently in most of the programming most of us do, but many developers are unaware of the concepts beyond a…
I love reading postmortems. They're educational, but unlike most educational docs, they tell an entertaining story. I've spent a decent chunk of time reading postmortems at both Google and Microsoft. I haven't done any kind of formal analysis on the most common causes of bad failures (yet), but there are a handful of…
Lately, as I’ve had more experience with it, I’ve started to warm up to the language Go (aka “golang”).
Recently the news broke that Microsoft may be working on another browser instead of IE. After reviewing the available evidence I’ve come to the conclusion that, although Microsoft is making a few adjustments, and a name change for IE might be a good idea, the new browser will essentially be IE12. Still, I think we web…
