On the Perceived Value of EV Certs, Commercial CAs, Phishing and Let's Encrypt
Last week I wrote about how Life Is About to Get a Whole Lot Harder for Websites Without HTTPS [https://www.troyhunt.com/life-is-about-to-get-harder-for-websites-without-https/]. Somewhere in the comments there, the discussion went off on a tangent about commercial CAs, the threat
Moving Java Forward Faster
For over twenty years the Java SE Platform and the JDK have evolved in large, irregular, and somewhat unpredictable steps. Each feature release has been driven by one or a few significant features, and so the schedule of each release has been adjusted as needed — sometimes more than once! — in order to accommodate the…
Terraform Gotchas and How We Work Around Them
Heap’s infrastructure runs on AWS, and we manage it using Terraform. This post is a collection of tips and gotchas we’ve picked up along the way.
This Dumb Industry: Wilson Boxes
Last week I linked to this video by Skill Up , which talks about how the concept of loot boxes developed inside of EA and how we got to where we are today. This time let’s talk about it in detail.
Lessons Learned from “On Writing Well”
The article is a summary of my lessons learned from On Writing Well by William Zinsser. By providing a summary I hope to help other developers to improve their writing. Apart from that it helps me to memorize my lessons learned.
Long-range communication with devices that consume almost no power
UW researchers have demonstrated for the first time that devices that run on almost zero power can transmit data across distances of up to 2.8 kilometers — brea
Filesystem error handling
We’re going to reproduce some results from papers on filesystem robustness that were written up roughly a decade ago : Prabhakaran et al. SOSP 05 paper , which injected errors below the filesystem and Gunawi et al. FAST 08 , which looked at how often filesystems failed to check return codes of functions that can…
Mavo: An HTML-based language for creating many kinds of web applications
Today I finally released the project I’ve been working on for the last two years at MIT CSAIL : An HTML-based language for creating (many kinds of) web applications without programming or a server backend. It’s named Mavo after my late mother ( Ma ria V er o u), and is Open Source of course (yes, getting paid to work…
How to Pick Your Next Gig: Evaluating Startups
Samvit Jain writes on startups, the tech industry, machine learning, and what he has learned along the way.
Voronoi Tessellations
Mapping nearest locations.
Django project optimization guide – Part 1
Django is a powerful framework used in many great projects. It provides many batteries, that speed up development and therefore reduces the price of it. When a project becomes large and is used by many users you inevitably will run into performance problems. In this guide, I will try define potential problems and how…
Telegram Desktop reaches version 1.0
First launched in 2013, Telegram Desktop graduates to version 1.0 today. We've added a fabulous new design and support for custom themes.
JavaScript Fatigue or My History with Web Development
I’ve only been a full time web developer for the past 5 years. It’s barely enough time to start calling myself a “senior” Software Engineer. In that short period of time the web technology stack has…
Is the keyboard faster than the mouse?
Which is faster, keyboard or mouse? A large number of programmers believe that the keyboard is faster for all (programming-related) tasks. However, there are a few widely cited webpages on AskTog which claim that Apple studies show that using the mouse is faster than using the keyboard for everything and that people…
Is Software Engineering Possible?
When the textile industry arose in the 18th century, craft was the norm in manufacturing. As the industrial revolution progressed, one after another sector of the economy made the transition from c…
SAFEs are not bad for entrepreneurs
Pascal Levensohn and Andrew Krowne recently published an article: “Why Safe Notes are not safe for entrepreneurs [https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/08/why-safe-notes-are-not-safe-for-entrepreneurs/] .” The authors were critical of the safe, describing it (as the click-bait title suggests), as bad for entrepreneurs. But…
Four DB2 Code Bases?
Many years ago I worked on IBM DB2 and so I occasionally get the question, “how the heck could you folks possibly have four relational database management system code bases?” Some go on to argue that a single code base would have been much more efficient. That’s certainly true. And, had we moved to a single code base…
OpenBSD and the modern laptop
Did you think that OpenBSD is suitable only for firewalls and high-security servers? Think again. Here are my steps to transform a modern m...
Redshift Spectrum – Exabyte-Scale In-Place Queries of S3 Data
Now that we can launch cloud-based compute and storage resources with a couple of clicks, the challenge is to use these resources to go from raw data to actionable results as quickly and efficiently as possible. Amazon Redshift allows AWS customers to build petabyte-scale data warehouses that unify data from a variety…