Version 0.9 of the Zig programming language is planned to release in about a week. One of the major changes coming in this release is a restructuring of how allocators work, which has been termed Allocgate . This is a breaking change to the Allocator API provided by the standard library, so pretty much any code that…
Offset pagination gets a bad rap because it’s backend inefficient, but it’s actually a nice feature from a consumer’s perspective. How to bring those advantages to cursor-based APIs.
This is an introductory article about shell injection, a security vulnerability allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the user's machine. This is a well-studied problem, and there are simple and efficient solutions to it. It's relatively easy to design library API in such a way as to shield the application…
Decentraland joins the Blender Development Fund for a period of two years, as Patron Member.
The other day I asked myself a seemingly trivial question: What was the first ATAPI CD-ROM drive and when was it available? Given that ATAPI was a major technology which instantly obsoleted all proprietary CD-ROM interfaces and made SCSI much less desirable, one might expect that there would have been some press…
Updated in 2026: glibc 2.43 added experimental support for building with Clang. In September 2021, I wrote "So, dear glibc, will you be happy with my sending Clang patches?" in Build glibc with LLD 13. We have come to a turning point. In Linux Plumbers Conference 2021, at the glibc Birds of a Feather session, I asked…
Enumerating and analyzing 40+ non-V8 JavaScript implementations
Benchmarks & Tips for Big Data, Hadoop, AWS, Google Cloud, PostgreSQL, Spark, Python & More...
Ed Balls Day is a bit of fun and the stuff of nonsense. It celebrates and remembers the day (28 April 2011) when British politician Ed Balls tweeted his name thinking he was entering it into a sear…
Using Postgres Hooks to protect functionality in your Postgres database.
The new VM Manager simplifies infrastructure and compliance management for the largest of Compute Engine VM fleets.
A number of years ago, an 8″ disk containing Seattle Computer Products (SCP) 86-DOS 1.0 was successfully imaged . The newest files on the disk are dated April 30, 1981, making the disk the oldest complete release of what was soon to be known as PC DOS and MS-DOS, about a month older than a pre-release of PC DOS from…
Learn common performance pitfalls and discover techniques to optimize your DISTINCT PostgreSQL queries. Read the full article on the Tiger Data blog.
It's been a while since I've done a graphicky post, so here's a new one for the chilly weather. Over on the doomed platform of magnificen...
This is the first post in a series I plan to write on the work from our group and others that combines ideas from deep learning with ideas from self-organization and collective systems. In this first post, we’ll look at some of the developed approaches and the domains they have…
These vendor-customised Android variants transmit substantial amounts of information to the OS developer and to third parties such as Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Facebook that have pre-installed system apps.
Excerpt from a speech Adm. Hyman Rickover (1900-1986) gave at Columbia University in 1982 outlining his leadership style.
Casey's reporting for The Verge brought some of the dirty laundry that helped motivate our change of direction regarding societal politics at Basecamp onto the public record. It erased part of that fine line we try to toe between sharing as much of the inner workings at the company as possible while respecting the…
While much attention has been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture is seldom discussed. This paper examines the most frequently deployed architecture: the BIG BALL OF MUD
The concept known as "worse is better" holds that in software making (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Christopher Alexander might call this "piecemeal growth." This is the story of the evolution of that concept.
"The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melteth in vain: for the wicked are not plucked away. Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the Lord hath rejected them."
I usually write about security features or techniques on Windows. But today’s blog is not directly related to any security topics, other than the usual added risk that any new system call introduces. However, it’s an interesting addition to the I/O world in Windows that could be useful for developers and I thought it…
Collaboration on rich text is hard to model with plain-text approaches. We review the challenges and how to construct a CRDT for rich text.
