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Introducing the next generation of Mac
A new MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini powered by M1, the first in a family of chips designed by Apple specifically for the Mac.
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Who Americans spend their time with, by age
How do people across the world spend their time? How do daily activities differ across countries, and how do these differences matter for people’s lives? Explore data and research on time use.
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Interview advice that got me offers
“What would you say if I asked you to design me a service capable of responding to thousands of user requests every second and latency was critical?”
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Writing a book: is it worth it?
My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications , recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book . Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming…
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Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Now Has S3 Compatible APIs
With B2 Cloud Storage S3 Compatible APIs, we’re making the choice for something different a no-brainer.
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Bootstrap 5 alpha
Bootstrap 5's very first alpha has arrived! We've been working hard for several months to refine the work we started in v4, and while we're feeling great about…
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How to contact Google SRE by dropping a shell in Cloud SQL
Note: The vulnerabilities that are discussed in this post were patched quickly and properly by Google. We support responsible disclosure. The research that resulted in this post was done by me and …
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New iPad Pro with LiDAR Scanner and trackpad support
Apple today unveiled its most advanced iPad Pro, adding an Ultra Wide camera and studio-quality mics, and a breakthrough LiDAR Scanner.
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Twitter still hasn't unlocked the New York Post's account
Then one must ask, why is the New York Post's Twitter account still locked?
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U.S. Treasury, Commerce Depts. Hacked Through SolarWinds Compromise
Communications at the U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments were reportedly compromised by a supply chain attack on SolarWinds , a security vendor that helps the federal government and a range of Fortune 500 companies monitor the health of their IT networks. Given the breadth of the company’s customer base, experts…
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Donald Knuth was framed
YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...
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Startup financial models – Templates compared for SaaS
Need a financial model for your startup? Fear not. I have extensively compared the top 12 templates, free and paid, so you don't have to do it.
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Firefox 73
Today we’ve released Firefox 73, with useful additions that include CSS and JavaScript updates, and numerous DevTools improvements. We’ve added to CSS logical properties, pushed performance forward in the Console ...
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A terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day at Slack
This story describes the technical details of the problems that caused the Slack downtime on May 12th, 2020. To learn more about the process behind incident response for same outage, read Ryan Katkov’s post, “All Hands on Deck”. On May 12, 2020, Slack had our first significant outage in a long time. We published a…
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An alternative argument for why women leave STEM
Everyone knows that you’re not supposed to start your argument with ‘everyone knows,’ but in this case, I think we ought to make an…
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Google Maps' Moat Is Evaporating
The views expressed in this newsletter are solely my own, and do not represent the views of my employer.
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Rust/WinRT Public Preview
We are excited to announce that the Rust/WinRT project finally has a permanent and public home on GitHub: https://github.com/microsoft/winrt-rs Rust/WinRT follows in the tradition established by C++/WinRT of building language projections for the Windows Runtime using standard languages and compilers, providing a…
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Jitsi Meet features update
Learn about Jitsi Meet features update including a new systems audio update and new translations features. Click here for more information.
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Let's remove quaternions from every 3D engine (2018)
To represent 3D rotations graphics programmers use Quaternions . However, Quaternions are taught at face value . We just accept their odd multiplication tables and other arcane definitions and use them as black boxes that rotate vectors in the ways we want. Why does $\mathbf{i}^2=\mathbf{j}^2=\mathbf{k}^2=-1$ and…
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Please stop using CDNs for external JavaScript libraries
I want to discuss a (minor) antipattern that I think is (slightly) harmful. Lots of websites use large Javascript libraries. They often include them by using a 3rd party Content Delivery Network like so: Copied HTML to 📋⧉ HTML<script src="https://cdn.example.com/js/library-v1.2.3.js"></script> There are, supposedly, a…
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John Conway
I was greatly saddened to learn that John Conway died yesterday from COVID-19, aged 82. My own mathematical areas of expertise are somewhat far from Conway’s; I have played for instance with …
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The iPad Awkwardly Turns 10
To reach its potential, Apple needs to recognize they have made profound conceptual mistakes in the iPad user interface, mistakes that need to be scrapped and replaced, not polished and refined. I worry that iPadOS 13 suggests the opposite — that Apple is steering the iPad full speed ahead down a blind alley.
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British Museum makes 1.9M images available for free
The British Museum has revamped its online collections database, making over 1.9 million photos of its collection available for free online under a Creative Commons license.
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The Airbnbs
To celebrate Airbnb’s IPO and to help future founders, I thought it might be useful to explain what was special about Airbnb. What was special about the Airbnbs was how earnest they were. They did nothing half-way, and we could sense this even in the interview. Sometimes after we interviewed a startup we’d be…
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How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
Most companies mistakenly apply value replication principles to discovery