Blog Posts

To do: Create an archive copy of every link in case the originals disappear.

Ted Unangst - out with the old, in with the less

 * http://www.tedunangst.com/flak/post/out-with-the-old-in-with-the-less

D. J. Bernstein - Some thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0
Architect systems so that most functions are untrusted. Minimize volume of code providing those functions. Minimize bug rate in that code My prediction: We will have invulnerable software systems, with no bugs in trusted code. We will be confident that these systems enforce the user’s security requirements


 * https://cr.yp.to/talks/2007.11.02/slides.pdf

Ryan Dahl - I hate almost all software.
There will come a point where the accumulated complexity of our existing systems is greater than the complexity of creating a new one. When that happens all of this shit will be trashed. We can flush boost and glib and autoconf down the toilet and never think of them again.


 * http://tinyclouds.org/rant.html
 * http://archive.is/hWeGB

Danny Tuppeny - Have Software Developers Given Up?
Over the last few years it feels like the quality of software and services across the industry is falling rather than climbing. Everything is always beta (both in name and quality). Things are shipped when marketing wants them to rather than when they’re ready because “we can easily patch them”. End users have basically become testers, but it’s ok, because this is Agile.


 * http://blog.dantup.com/2016/04/have-software-developers-given-up/
 * http://archive.is/kcnlr

Programming Sucks - Still Drinking
the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses.


 * http://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks
 * http://archive.is/XfxE3
 * Dramatic Reading: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MticYPfFRp8

Fabrice Bellard: Portrait of a Super-Productive Programmer

 * http://blog.smartbear.com/careers/fabrice-bellard-portrait-of-a-super-productive-programmer/

Justin Jackson - I'm a fucking webmaster
it was simple, but it was focused. No distractions, just: what idea are you trying to express?


 * https://justinjackson.ca/webmaster/
 * http://archive.is/ac1LA

Adam Landley - Cleaning up the toybox code
Advice on crunching your C code down til it's tiny.


 * http://landley.net/toybox/cleanup.html

Dadgum - Death of a Language Dilettante

 * http://prog21.dadgum.com/219.html
 * http://archive.is/86u8h

Eric Elliot - The Shocking Secret About Static Types
Contains a bug density by language chart.


 * https://medium.com/javascript-scene/the-shocking-secret-about-static-types-514d39bf30a3#.j22lakbpc
 * http://archive.is/IeURl

Richard Gabriel - Habitability and Piecemeal Growth (excerpt)
Habitability makes a place livable, like home. And this is what we want in software—that developers feel at home, can place their hands on any item without having to think deeply about where it is.
 * http://akkartik.name/post/habitability

Kent Mitchell - Ada Mailing list "the ultimate in garbage collection"
From: k...@rational.com (Kent Mitchell) Subject: Re: Does memory leak? Date: 1995/03/31 Message-ID: <3lhdjd$l6h@rational.rational.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 100649473 distribution: world references: <3kopao$ekg@nef.ens.fr>  <3kvccb$18ru@watnews1.watson.ibm.com> organization: Rational Software Corporation newsgroups: comp.lang.ada

Norman H. Cohen (nco...@watson.ibm.com) wrote:
 * The only programs I know of with deliberate memory leaks are those whose
 * executions are short enough, and whose target machines have enough
 * virtual memory space, that running out of memory is not a concern.
 * (This class of programs includes many student programming exercises and
 * some simple applets and utilities; it includes few if any embedded or
 * safety-critical programs.)

This sparked and interesting memory for me. I was once working with a customer who was producing on-board software for a missile. In my analysis of the code, I pointed out that they had a number of problems with storage leaks. Imagine my surprise when the customers chief software engineer said "Of course it leaks". He went on to point out that they had calculated the amount of memory the application would leak in the total possible flight time for the missile and then doubled that number. They added this much additional memory to the hardware to "support" the leaks. Since the missile will explode when it hits it's target or at the end of it's flight, the ultimate in garbage collection is performed without programmer intervention.

-- Kent Mitchell                  | One possible reason that things aren't Technical Consultant            | going according to plan is ..... Rational Software Corporation  | that there never *was* a plan!

https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.lang.ada/E9bNCvDQ12k/1tezW24ZxdAJ

Imaginary Problems - George
... I am absolutely convinced that the neophilia and constant complication of otherwise straightforward projects is a neurotic response similar to parrots plucking feathers and mutilating themselves when given not enough to do.

comment from the article


 * https://blog.cerebralab.com/#!/blog/16
 * http://archive.is/OYoRC
 * https://lobste.rs/s/l8x4ru

Interim OS: Reclaiming the Computer through Minimalism and Genericity - Lukas F. Hartmann

 * http://dump.mntmn.com/interim-paper/

Write code that is easy to delete, not easy to extend. - tef

 * https://programmingisterrible.com/post/139222674273/write-code-that-is-easy-to-delete-not-easy-to

Correcting A Widespread Error in Unification Algorithms- PETER NORVIG
Case study on how hard it is to write a working function. See also the 50 year binary search integer overflow bug.


 * http://norvig.com/unify-bug.pdf

1% the code - Chuck Moore
colorForth does it differently. There is no syntax, no redundancy, no typing. There are no errors that can be detected. Forth uses postfix, there are no parentheses. No indentation. Comments are deferred to the documentation. No hooks, no compatibility. Words are never hyphenated. There's no heirarchy. No files. No operating system.


 * https://colorforth.github.io/1percent.html

Software disenchantment - Tonsky
So I want to call it out: where we are today is bullshit. As engineers, we can, and should, and will do better. We can have better tools, we can build better apps, faster, more predictable, more reliable, using fewer resources (orders of magnitude fewer!). We need to understand deeply what are we doing and why.


 * https://tonsky.me/blog/disenchantment/

When did software go off the rails? - Jason Hanley
There is one thing that has baffled me in my long career in technology.

Hardware capability increases exponentially, but software somehow just bloats up, using the power and space, without providing much more functionality or value.


 * https://www.jasonhanley.com/blog/2017/08/when-did-software-go-off-the-rails/

The resource leak bug of our civilization - viznut
Our mainstream economic system is oriented towards maximal production and growth. This effectively means that participants are forced to maximize their portions of the cake in order to stay in the game. It is therefore necessary to insert useless and even harmful "tumor material" in one's own economical portion in order to avoid losing one's position. This produces an ever-growing global parasite fungus that manifests as things like black boxes, planned obsolescence and artificial creation of needs.

Chopping one's own wood may be a useful way to counteract the alienation of the classic industrial society, as oldschool factories and heating stoves still have some basics in common. In order to counteract the alienation caused by computer technology, however, we need to find new kind of focal things and practices that are more computerish. If they cannot be found, they need to be created. Crafting with low-complexity computer and electronic systems, including the creation of art based on them is my strongest candidate for such a focal practice among those practices that already exist in subcultural form.

Another important countercultural aspect of the demoscene is the relationship with computing platforms. The mainstream regards platforms as neutral devices that can be used to reach a predefined result, while the demoscene regards them as a kind of raw material that has a specific essence of its own


 * http://viznut.fi/texts-en/resource_leak_bug_of_our_civilization.html

People that tweet about things being broken
Why do I continue to toot about all computers failing regularly? Because most of us disbelieve it. It'll never work if we believe it works.


 * https://twitter.com/garybernhardt

technically everything is user error.

expecting this shit stack to work?

user error.


 * https://twitter.com/sadserver

DELETE ALL SOFTWARE IT WAS A TERRIBLE IDEA IN THE FIRST PLACE


 * https://twitter.com/PHP_CEO/status/663724239837642753

bat: a version of cat that takes 2 hours to install.


 * https://twitter.com/brunoborges/status/1036003951362154497

A friend of mine just just tried debugging why he couldn't compile various pieces of software (for example cmake) and stumbled upon something rather hilarious:

As it turns out the compiler checks during the configure stage fail because they do a string match on the word "warning". If it finds that word in the output it rejects the compiler, as it assumes it to be not working correctly.

My friend's username? Oh, nothing special, it's simply "m_warning".


 * https://mastodon.social/@fribbledom/101704920375193432