The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999)
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Open Publication License, version 2.0.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Open Publication License, version 2.0.
Introduction So I recently completed my PhD in Mathematics from the University of Oxford. (Hurrah! It was so much fun.) In 2-and-a-bit years I wrote 12 papers, received 4139 GitHub stars, got 3271 Twitter followers, authored 1 textbook – doing double-duty as my thesis – and got the coveted big-tech job-offer. On…
Here’s how to get into a lot of trouble: Suppose you (like me) love the intellectual wealth found in free-form text on the Internet. And (like me) are a reasonably competent programmer. And (like me) have derived value and pleasure searching Twitter. And (like me) you look at this nifty new Fediverse thing and see…
I ♥ to /bin/bash and last week I came around the one bash book to rule them all.
ps aux | more
Art critic David Sylvester on the perils of working too much in the public eye.
Knock knock? Who’s there? It’s me, Oskar, the end is near, did you know that? Ah, you know it but don’t know how to proceed? Let’s talk about the end of the CRUD world…
Andy reviews his favorite NoSQL and NewSQL database shirts.
If you were deciding on whether to use AWS, Azure or Google Cloud for a production application, what factors would you use to make the decision? There are probably many such factors you might think of, but I'd like to point out one that probably isn't commonly considered: the relative trustworthiness of Google's…
Yesterday a Reddit link started going around the IF circles: "Wait," I thought, "haven't I seen that map before?" No, I had not. But I sort of had? Then I looked through my collection of Zork maps. Then I realized, oh no, I have a collection ...
I updated the whoami.filippo.io dataset! I explain how it works, and how I fetched the new data.
Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two). For the demo scene , this was the only Amiga configuration that mattered during…
A couple of weeks ago, I was in an internal meeting where our CTO (Adam Prout) was giving a talk to our summer interns. The talk was about the current state of database companies, and how different providers are competing on different facets of their products. As the talk was
If an algorithm is the death of high school English, maybe that's an okay thing.
I love toe socks and I think you should too
After years of battles over Bills C-11 and C-18, few Canadians will have the appetite for yet another troubling Internet bill. But given a bill that envisions government-backed censorship, mandates age verification to use search engines or social media sites, and creates a framework for court-ordered website blocking…
A failed founder’s survival guide
Stockpicking of unloved and undervalued Japanese companies using the Graham and Dodd framwork of value investing.
Update: NIST released a draft that modified their recommendations (Oct 2024) 1) . RSA 2048 is to be only considered “deprecated” after 2030. The draft states:
wingolog: article: i accidentally a scheme
Several domain names tied to Genesis Market , a bustling cybercrime store that sold access to passwords and other data stolen from millions of computers infected with malicious software, were seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) today. The domain seizures coincided with more than a hundred arrests in…
This guide shows you how to write, structure, visualize and manage software architecture documentation in a lean way using appropriate documentation tools.
Industrial genius Carl Braun believed that clear thinking and clear communication go hand in hand. Here the guide on writing productively to get things done.
I’ve put in my fair share of time with PostgreSQL. It has no shortage of functionality and I believe its expansive feature set drove a lot of its growing popularity in the 2010s. As my time with the database has worn on I’ve come up with a handful of features that I wish the database had. Some of these are ideas…
Everything the bros told you about how to train was wrong. Ok, not everything, obviously, but quite a lot of “everyone knows this” ideas turned out to be wrong. And after having lived and trained in over 50 countries, I think I know why. The origin of broscience People often ask me how they train in Taiwan or Ecuador…
This post will be a bit all over the place. Several months ago, I wrote Hard Mode Rust, exploring an allocation-conscious style of programming. In the ensuing discussion, @jamii name-dropped TigerBeetle, a reliable, distributed, fast, and small database written in Zig in a similar style, and, well, I now find myself…
All engineers are good writers of code. I argue that they should also write non-code.
Here is a copy of the MIT license. One of the well-known open source licenses. It is, effectively, the only license that I’ve used for software I wrote or contributed in the last 10 years:
Yesterday, I ran my script to check how many comments on the monthly Hacker News Who's hiring post mention a remote option. Remote jobs reached a level of 75 % - 80 % and stayed there (it doesn't look like that's going to change soon), but what's striking is the drop in the …