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Write libraries instead of services, where possible
For any developer with limited resources, this means a library (where viable) can provide the same functionality to the user, at a lower cost to the developer than a service.
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My House
On the 19th of August 2019, I bought a house with a small garden. The house is what in English apparently is called an allotment. Basically, a small slot meant for vegetable gardening which sometimes has a house or shed. Not really meant for living in. But after nearly a year of work, I moved into mine. It’s legal as…
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Reprojecting the Perseverance landing footage onto satellite imagery
The landing of the Mars 2020 Perseverance rover last month amazed the world. The stunning footage of the descent shows each stage of the sequence. If you have not seen it already you can watch it here .
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Books that changed my career as a software engineer
I'd like to present five books that have changed my mind about software development showing me lots of concepts, techniques and tips. Let's see them and why I they were so valuable to me
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It takes a PhD to develop that
In light of recent events regarding the performance of the Windows terminal 1 , I thought it would be worth spending some time on this topic, since it uncovers a few problems that are pestering the software industry.
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Papers every developer should read at least twice (2009)
10 Papers Every Developer Should Read - (At Least Twice)
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Lena
A note from the author You can now buy this story as part of my collection, Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories. This collection also includes a sequel story, titled "Driver". This article is about the standard test brain image. For the original human, see Mi...
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Open source projects should run office hours
Back in December I decided to try something new for my Datasette open source project: Datasette Office Hours. The idea is simple: anyone can book a 25 minute conversation with …
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Speed of Rust vs. C
The run-time speed and memory usage of programs written in Rust should about the same as of programs written in C, but overall programming style of these languages is different enough that it's hard to generalize their speed. This is a summary of where they're the same, where C is faster, and where Rust is faster.
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Brave, the false sensation of privacy
ebin.city is a short 4-character .city domain available for buy. Listed at $100 — secure it before someone else does.
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A single line of code made a 24-core server slower than a laptop
Imagine you wrote a program for a pleasingly parallel problem, where each thread does its own independent piece of work, and the threads don’t need to coordi...
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Spreadsheet formulas for personal finance
I love spreadsheets. Spreadsheet programs like Microsoft’s Excel, Apple’s Numbers and Google Sheets are the secret heroes of our civilization.
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How credit cards make money
Credit cards make money through net interest, interchange, fees, and marketing contributions.
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Facts every web dev should know before they burn out and turn to painting
Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
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Please, enough with the dead butterflies (2017)
We all have pet peeves, even though there's a lot going on in the world that makes them pretty insignificant. While acknowledging that there are many more
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Hidden Networks in TP-Link Routers
I was debugging my WiFi settings this week when I noticed something strange. WiFi Analyzer was showing two hidden networks coming from my router, one for each frequency: 2.4GHz and 5GHz. Networks which I haven't configured and didn't appear in my router's admin interface. WTF?
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Prefer the British Style of Quotation Mark Punctuation over the American
Texts on this and that.
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Ubiquiti all but confirms breach response iniquity
Last year, I posted a series of articles about a purported “breach” at Ubiquiti. My sole source for that reporting was the person who has since been indicted by federal prosecutors for his alleged wrongdoing – which includes providing false information to the press.
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It's virtually impossible to read old iMessages and they take up tons of storage
Many iPhone owners have iMessages from years ago that they can’t access. For example, my wife and I simply want to read the first few messages that we exchanged in 2017, but we can’t. A friend of mine recently had to prove she had a relationship with someone for US immigration services, and she was able to quickly…
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Building a data team at a mid-stage startup
You are brought into a startup to run their three-person data team. This is a story about teams and organization, and how you spend a year getting the team to a good place.
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How to make a CPU – a simple picture-based explanation
The purpose of this article is to explain how to make a CPU out of rocks and sand as fast as possible without using too many words. As the world of proprietary hardware and software crushes in around us, we risk losing the ability to make things for ourselves as individuals. It is for this reason that I felt compelled…
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Try This One Weird Trick Russian Hackers Hate
In a Twitter discussion last week on ransomware attacks, KrebsOnSecurity noted that virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards…