Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)
(Note: This was written in 2016. I recently — in late 2019 — wrote a post about some things I’ve learned since then .)
Firefox Was Always Enough
There are many concerns about Mozilla right now, and reason to be concerned. While I am no longer with Mozilla, it’s still a place that supported me for many years; I believe in Mozilla and want the project to succeed.
What Gödel Discovered
In 1931, a 25-year-old Kurt Gödel wrote a proof that turned mathematics upside down. The implication was so astounding, and his proof so elegant that it was...kind of funny. I wanted to share his discovery with you. Fair warning though, I’m not a mathematician; I’m a programmer. This means my understanding is…
How we recovered $300k of Bitcoin
Story time! Around twenty years ago, I was working as a reverse-engineer and cryptanalyst for AccessData while getting my Physics degree at BYU. It was the late 90s and early 2000s. The US governme…
The Decline of Usability
If you find this text interesting, please consider also reading The Decline of Usability: Revisited or some of my other many ramblings on modern user interfaces.
Who’s behind the “reopen” domain surge?
The past few weeks have seen a large number of new domain registrations beginning with the word “reopen” and ending with U.S. city or state names. The largest number of them were created just hours after President Trump sent a series of all-caps tweets urging citizens to “liberate” themselves from new gun control…
Career advice for people with bad luck
Most career advice on the internet is from people who had some sort of meteoric success.
Booting from a vinyl record
Most PCs tend to boot from a primary media storage, be it a hard disk drive, or a solid-state drive, perhaps from a network, or – if all else fails – the USB stick or the boot DVD comes to the rescue… Fun, eh? Boring! Why don’t we try to boot from a record player for a change?
Unbricking a $2k bike with a $10 Raspberry Pi
A few years ago I splurged on an exercise bike. It’s a pretty expensive item imho, both in upfront and ongoing subscription costs. But I was able to justify it by riding it all the time so that per-ride it wasn’t that expensive. I’m happy to say this was a huge boon for my fitness and it was worth every penny.
You've only added two lines – why did that take two days?
It might seem a reasonable question, but it makes some terrible assumptions: lines of code = effort lines of code = value all lines of c...
Private client-side-only PWAs are hard, but now Apple made them impossible
AndreGarzia.com website
Systems Design for Advanced Beginners
This post is part of my Programming for Advanced Beginners series. Subscribe now to receive specific, actionable ways to make your code cleaner, every other week, entirely free.
Security by obscurity is underrated
Some thoughts about cyber security, technology and life - https://utkusen.com/. Click to read Utku Sen’s Substack, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.
Software Disenchantment (2018)
Everything is going to hell and nobody seems to care
A half-hour to learn Rust
In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it. But how can you read a lot of it if you don’t know what it means? In this article, instead of focusing on one or...
Using Anki to remember what you read
Imagine this:
Intel's disruption is now complete
“Look, Clayton, I’m a busy man and I don’t have time to read drivel from academics but someone you told me you had this theory… and I’m…
Single Page Applications using Rust
Easy to follow guide to building SPAs using Rust, WebAssembly and Yew
1:60 scale Boeing 777 made from manila folders
The homepage of the work for which I'm best known — a model Boeing 777, made entirely from manila folders!
Six Months of Tiny Projects
In this post I'll give an update on how my Tiny Projects are performing six months on, and the pros and cons of launching micro-businesses.
Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root on macOS Silently
Yuebin Sun(@yuebinsun2020) of Tencent Security Xuanwu Lab 0x0 SummaryToday, Adobe Acrobat Reader DC for macOS patched three critical vulnerabilities(CVE-2020-9615, CVE-2020-9614, CVE-2020-9613) I repo
VVVVVV’s source code is now public, 10 year anniversary jam happening now
Or possibly tomorrow is, depending on who you ask – technically, the game first went live at 3am GMT on the 11th January 2010, after a very, very long day of fixing every last bug I could, making last minute builds , and trying to slowly upload everything on an extremely unreliable internet connection that kept…
Google Blew a Ten-Year Lead
Back when there were rumors of Google building an operating system, I thought “Lol.” Then I watched then-PM Sundar Pichai announce Chrome OS. My heart raced. It was perfect. I got my email through Gmail, I wrote documents on Docs, I listened to Pandora, I viewed photos on TheFacebook.
Reasons not to become famous
I felt like I somehow needed fame. In retrospect, there was a lot of self-loathing from tough childhood experiences, and I desperately hoped that love from without (i.e., from masses of other people) would somehow make up for hate from within.
Don't use third party auth to sign in
If a website offers you to sign-in using Google (or any third-party service, say Facebook, Github, etc.), don’t use that feature.
My FOSS Story
I’d like to break from my normal tradition of focusing almost strictly on technical content and share a bit of my own personal relationship with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). While everyone is different, my hope is that sharing my perspective will help build understanding, empathy and trust.
Zig cc: A drop-in replacement for GCC/Clang
If you have heard of Zig before, you may know it as a promising new programming language which is ambitiously trying to overthrow C as the de-facto systems language. But did you know that it also can straight up compile C code?