If there’s one thing that engineers, engineering managers, and technology executives are likely to agree on, it’s that there’s a crisis of technical quality. One diagnosis and cure is easy to identify: our engineers aren’t prioritizing quality, and we need to hire better engineers or retrain the ones we have. Of…
Over the past few weeks, Zoom’s use has exploded since it became the video conferencing platform of choice in today’s COVID-19 world. (My own university, Harvard, uses it for all of its classes. Boris Johnson had a cabinet meeting over Zoom.) Over that same period, the company has been exposed for having both lousy…
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
It's May 1949 and British Rail was showing off its latest idea to please the public - a travelling pub.
I receive a fair amount of email from strangers. My email address is public, which doesn’t seemto be a popular choice these days, but I’ve received enough inspiring correspondence over the yearsto leave it be.When I receive a GPG encrypted email from a stranger, though, I immediately get the fee...
I took Heroku for granted, and a month into setting up my own infra, I now know how much it bought me.
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…
As a "fully remote work" company, we had to make some choices about the technologies we use to work together and stay in touch. We decided...
This past Friday was my last day working in Mojave.
Something that is kind of annoying about NASA photos is that they end up so touched up, and so many liberties taken with them that they become creatures of their own.
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…
Common problems in financial recon, for fintechs, particularly those building deposit products and managing their own ledger.
If the text is neatly neatly isolated inside an HTML element, it’s easy; this will do:
This investigation started, as so many of mine do, with me minding my own business, not looking for trouble. In this case all I was doing was opening my laptop lid and trying to log on.The first fe…
From Colt's traveling show to the Wrights' bicycle shop
This is Part 2 in a series of posts describing the Raft distributed consensus algorithm and its complete implementation in Go. Here is a list of posts in the series:
By the end of this blog post, we aim to improve the results of my previous blog post of approximating circular bokeh with a sum of 4 separable filters and reducing its artifacts (left) through an o…
The coronavirus has pretty much turned the aviation industry upside down and taken it on its wildest ride ever. No one could have ever predicted a pandemic of this proportion to have this kind of f…
The doors 2019-nCoV will open, and the doors it will close.
All the weird outcomes from the most counterintuitive recession in history.
To check if a program is doing what it should, you can inspect the output from a given input. But as the system grows, you also need logging to help you understand what is happening. Good log messa…
Iron Law of Bureaucracy: the downwards deletionism spiral discourages contribution and is how Wikipedia will die.
