1981
How Pinterest scaled
Pinterest's tech stack explained simply
1982
A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely
Engineering, Robotics, AI, Technology
1983
When deployments are easy, code becomes simpler
You bump into DORA in the wild a lot.
1984
Notes on rarely-seen game mechanics
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
1985
Clean mount lists in Linux
A solution to the problem of the growing number of mount points and loopback devices in (Ubuntu) Linux.
1986
Learn Wayland by writing a GUI from scratch
Wayland is all the rage those days. Distributions left and right switch to it, many readers of my previous article on writing a X11 GUI from scratch in x86_64 assembly asked for a follow-up article about Wayland, and I now run Wayland on my desktop. So here we go, let's write a (very simple) GUI program with Wayland…
1987
Exploring EXIF
Exploratory interfaces for navigating photos
1988
My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
When I owned Piper N47943, a four seat single engine airplane, I thought it prudent not to fly myself to assignments. I did not want the…
1989
1990
1991
Cyberdecks (2013)
Article about the philosophy of custom made computers without displays, usually known as decks.
1992
Closing a stale SSH connection
Suppose you’re connected to a remote host with SSH and after a while the SSH session goes stale. The terminal is unresponsive and no keypress seem to take effect. There might be something with the network, the remote host is restarting or maybe your machine has been in hibernation, there could be multiple reasons for…
1993
I wrote a string type
I write compilers for fun. I can’t help it. Consequently, I also write a lot of parsers. In systems programming, it’s usually a good idea to try to share memory rather than reuse it, so as such my AST types tend to look like this.
1994
Why we need to know LR and recursive descent parsing techniques
A couple of people have asked me for my thoughts on part of an article from Tiark Rompf called (roughly) “ Just Write the Parser ” which advocates the use of recursive descent parsing over more “formal” approaches to parsing, at least in the context of teaching compilers. I’m fairly sure I read this article a couple…
1995
The legend of “x86 CPUs decode instructions into RISC form internally” (2020)
A dive into what x86 instruction are decoded into various processors, to determine the truth of the idea that they're just RISC-like internally.
1996
What every IT person needs to know about OpenBSD (2021)
How to have fun with the world’s most important free software project "Functional, free and secure by default", OpenBSD remains a crucial yet largely unacknowledged player in the open source field. This talk aims to highlight the project's signature security features and development practices -- razor sharp focus on…
1997
What makes developers productive?
Many ingredients go into developer productivity. Some are obvious and easy to measure (build times are an easy example to point to). But I think we tend to miss other important factors, perhaps because they are hard to directly measure. For example, no system collects a number that shows how well each developer…
1998
Report on an Unidentified Space Station (1982)
By good luck we have been able to make an emergency landing on this uninhabited space station. There have been no casualties. We all count ourselves fortunate to have found safe haven at a moment when the expedition was clearly set on disaster.
1999
Web Apps on macOS Sonoma 14 Beta
The personal blog of Thomas Steiner
2000
Why You Should Write Your Own Static Site Generator
I rewrote my personal website using basic libraries and the flexibility is incredible.
2001
Ego Death
Social media aggravates the ego. Virtuous content drifts to the extremes and becomes counter productive at scale. Focusing on external validation is futile and robs the soul of a deeper meaning.
2002
2003
2004
Rebuilding a featured news section with modern CSS: Vox news
Rebuilding Vox News featured section with modern CSS.
2005
Get It Done
Too often people do the best they can with what they have when they should instead get it done
2006
The many faces of DISTINCT in Postgres (2017)
3 interesting uses of DISTINCT in PostgreSQL
2007
The cheapest flash microcontroller you can buy is actually an Arm Cortex-M0+
Puya's 10-cent PY32 series is complicating the RISC-V narrative and has me doubting I'll ever reach for an 8-bit part again.
2008
PostgreSQL Encryption: The Available Options
On an episode of Postgres FM , the hosts had a (very brief) discussion of data encryption in PostgreSQL. While Postgres FM is a podcast well worth a subscribe, the hosts aren’t data security experts, and so as someone who builds a queryable database encryption system , I found the coverage to be somewhat… lacking. I…
2009
2010
Bing Jail
A short story on how my website lost all indexed pages in Bing, affecting my presence in DuckDuckGo, secret blacklisting and classification as a splog by Bing AI