1
Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT
Unless you have been living under a rock, you have heard of this new ChatGPT assistant made by OpenAI. Did you know, that you can run a whole virtual machine inside of ChatGPT?
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Please put units in names
Using strong types, or putting units in names, is a small effort that can make a tremendous difference for code readability.
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“Code” 2nd Edition
I am overjoyed to announce that the 2nd edition of my book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software will be published by Pearson on August 19, 2022. As you can see, the covers of the two editions are nearly identical except that the 2nd edition uses the “dark mode” option:
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When hiring developers, have the candidate read existing code
When hiring developers, there are many things we are looking for, but over the years I have found that raw coding ability is easily the most important quality to look for. I can quickly…
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Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things
This article is about a few quick thumb rules I use when writing shell scripts that I’ve come to appreciate over the years. Very opinionated....
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Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print
(I'm still looking for the catchiest way to appreciate the number MMXXVI. Exercise 7.2.1.6–122 gives 1234+.5*6+789 and -1+2345*6/7+8+9 and 1+(2/3)*45*67.8-9 ; other suggestions are welcome. The most elegant that I've seen so far is a beauty that was suggested independently by Arnaud Lefebvre and by Evangelos…
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How I make a living working on SerenityOS
This post describes in detail how I support myself while working on the SerenityOS project.
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A 14kb page can load much faster than a 15kb page
What is surprising is that a 14kB page can load much faster than a 15kB page — maybe 612ms faster — while the difference between a 15kB and a 16kB page is trivial.
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The best engineering interview question I've ever gotten
It’s been a while since I was on the receiving end of a software engineering interview. But I still remember my favorite interview question. It was at MemSQL circa 2013. (They haven’t even kept their name, so I assume they’re not still relying on this specific interview question. I don’t feel bad for revealing it…
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What does it mean to listen on a port?
This story explores some concepts in computer networking, inspired by Michael Nielsen’s idea of discovery fiction . Code samples can also be found in this repo . Excerpts use openbsd-flavoured netcat on Debian Linux; behviour and IPv6 support may vary by version.
12
I built a receipt printer for GitHub issues
I wanted a way to have physical tickets from GitHub in front of me. One Epson printer, a Raspberry Pi, and some PHP later, I had a working system in place.
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Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits
While I was leading PKC’s security practice, we did probably 20-30 code security audits, almost of all of them for startups that were just around their Series A or B (that was usually when they had cash and realized that it’d be good to take a deeper look at their security, after the do-or-die focus on product market…
15
Investigating why Steam started picking a random font
Out of the blue my Steam started picking a random font I had in my user fonts dir: Virgil , the Excalidraw font.
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New(ish) command line tools
A list of new(ish) command line tools
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A career ending mistake
As software engineers, we're constantly making detailed, elaborate plans for computers to execute. Isn't it weird that we rarely give a moment's thought to the program for our own careers?
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Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang
In the two years since I’ve posted I want off Mr Golang’s Wild Ride, it’s made the rounds time and time again, on Reddit, on Lobste.rs, on HackerNews, and elsewhere. And every time, it elicits the ...
19
Everything I wish I knew when learning C
Learning C was quite difficult for me. The basics of the language itself weren’t so bad, but “programming in C” requires a lot of other kinds of knowledge which aren’t as easy to pick up on:
20
A Linux Evening
I love to have Linux as my main OS. For someone who spends most of his time programming, writing HTML, writing LaTeX, and browsing the net, it is nearly a perfect tool. Packages are one "apt install" away. Mounting my website is one sshfs away and with private key authentication I don't even have to type my password…
21
How Wine works 101
Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, macOS, & BSD (https://www.winehq.org). If you have been using Linux for some time now, chances are you’ve used Wine at some point. Maybe to run that one very important Windows program that…
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The last three years of my work will be permanently abandoned
It’s been almost two years since my last update here. A lot has happened. I hope you all are continuing to weather the ongoing multiple global pandemics and other anthropogenic crises. Apolog…
23
Just use Postgres for everything
Replace Redis, MongoDB, Kafka & more with PostgreSQL. Reduce complexity, boost development speed. Complete guide with real examples.
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Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux
It’s an exciting time in the Lotus 1-2-3 enthusiast community – that was a joke, there is no enthusiast community, it’s just me! 😆
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Turns are better than radians
Switching away from radians makes code simpler, faster, and more precise.
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Correctness and composability bugs in the Julia ecosystem
For many years I used the Julia programming language for transforming, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data, doing statistics, and performing simulations.
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Difftastic, the fantastic diff
programming, language design, and human factors
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SPAs Were a Mistake
For years, a trend in our industry has been to build single-page apps, or SPAs. With an SPA, the entire site or app lives in a single HTML file. After the initial load, everything about the app is handled with JavaScript. This is, in theory, supposed to result in web apps that feel as fast and snappy as native apps…
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Git ignores .gitignore with .gitignore in .gitignore
A fun, if predictable and pointless exercise.
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Soft deletion probably isn't worth it
The traditional soft deletion pattern using <code>deleted_at</code> columns leaks into code, curbs the usefulness of foreign keys, and makes data removal difficult. Luckily, there’s an alternative.