People Hacks for Technical Leads RB

Programmers like to talk a lot about how much they hate meetings, but pair programming is a meeting. Whiteboarding is a meeting. Lots of things that provide value and are enjoyable in the software development process are technically meetings … just with a slightly different format. Both pair programming and whiteboarding are multichannel in nature. …

We don’t talk about these things as meetings because they don’t feel like meetings. They feel like productive work. Meetings in engineering environments suffer because they force people from activities that are usually multichannel in nature to activities that are monochannel.

Great read if you’re leading a team or thinking about it.

NandGame - Build a computer from scratch. RB

The Nand Game takes you though building a working computer, starting from the most basic components. It does not require any prerequisites, in particular it does not require any previous knowledge about computer architecture or software, and does not require math skills beyond addition and subtraction. It does require some patience—some of the tasks might take a while to solve.

The game consists of a series of levels. In each level you are tasked with building a component that behaves according to a specification. This component can then be used as a building-block in the next level.

This is amazing. Played and completed it last night. XOR and full-adder were the hardest ones for me. After that it was just careful thought and dealing with a lot of concepts I was already familiar with from programming. I don’t think the robot exercise at the very end added much for me, but the rest of it was top notch.

When you’re done you’ll actually have built a whole tiny CPU - complete with instruction fetch, decode, execute; also, small arithmetic (add, sub) and logic (lt, gt, eq, inv) units, working RAM and a few registers. You can flip the clock input on and off and watch it grind one instruction at a time.

What are some things that only someone who has been programming 20-50 years would know? RB

Everything in software development has already been invented. People just keep rediscovering it and pretending they invented it. Whatever you think is so cool and new, was copied from Smalltalk, or HAKMEM, or Ivan Sutherland, or Douglas Engelbart, or early IBM, or maybe Bell Labs.

No matter how many managers are screaming at you, the first step is to reliably replicate the bug.

And other gems… great short little read.

Update on Zoho Services Disruption - Zoho Blog RB

The shutdown was done by an automatic algorithm in response to phishing complaints against Zoho. … Phishing is rampant and mail services providers like Zoho have devised multiple methods to combat it like blacklisting, flagging suspicious emails, scanning, smart filters, and other methods. According to Symantec, 76% of all organizations have reported falling victim to phishing attacks in 2017.

In this case, the registrar received 3 phishing complaints over the last two months (from recipients of third parties phishing messages impersonating Zoho mail), 2 of which were addressed immediately and 1 was under investigation. To put these numbers into context, just one security service company blocked 51 million phishing attempts in 2017.

[sigh] I feel for Zoho. This really sucks. I wonder how many people literally die every year from broken automated systems behaving poorly without proper oversight. I wonder if there is any research on that?

This type of “abuse handling” with no human oversight/intervention (or obviously not nearly enough) is NOT a good thing.

You have my assurance that nothing like this will ever happen again. We will not let our fate be determined by the automated algorithms of others. We will be a domain registrar ourselves.

Well… I guess that’s one solution - but not necessarily a practical one for everybody.

John C. Dvorak: How 5G Got me fired RB

My [column’s] conclusion was that, unless this stopped, 5G would never get off the ground.

I never once considered that expunging my column then firing me would be part of this process. I’ve asked the editors about this and got no replies.

This is a cautionary tale. Anyone writing for any publisher in today’s commercial market, where the managed advertorial and native ad seems to be the only way to make money, needs to be cautious.

This is sad. The Internet these days is turning into such a terrible mix of good and evil, pros and cons. And I agree completely, native advertising is one of the evils.

The difference between an int and a pointer? RB

What should we take away from this? First, it is a big mistake to try to understand pointers in a programming language as if they follow the same rules as pointer-sized integer values.

…

So what are the actual rules that Clang and GCC are following when compiling these examples? The short answer is that it’s complicated and not well documented.

Good advice for pointers. Be careful, there be dragons! :-)

...catching some z’s on the Arduino... RB

Hell yeah.

rianhunter/wasmjit RB

Wasmjit is a small embeddable WebAssembly runtime. Its core is written in C90 and is easily portable to most environments.

Its primary target is a Linux kernel module that can host Emscripten-generated WebAssembly modules. In this configuration it runs WebAssembly modules in kernel-space (ring 0) and provides access to system calls as normal function calls. This configuration avoids user-kernel transition overhead, as well as scheduling overheads from swapping page tables. This results in a significant performance increase for syscall-bound programs like web servers or FUSE file systems.

Accessibility for Everyone by Laura Kalbag RB

From the e-mail they just sent me:

We were thrilled to launch Accessibility for Everyone in paperback and ebook just one year ago , and now Laura’s added an audiobook to the mix—available on Audible! Read on for a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the audiobook, plus grab a special code to save an extra 10% on the paperback and ebook versions.

Yes, “Accessibilty for Everyone” is truly now more accessible for everyone. [chuckles]

To be clear that’s a good thing; I just found it funny happening a year later.

How It Works | Solid RB

Within the Solid ecosystem, you decide where you store your data. Photos you take, comments you write, contacts in your address book, calendar events, how many miles you run each day from your fitness tracker… they’re all stored in your Solid POD. This Solid POD can be in your house or workplace, or with an online Solid POD provider of your choice. Since you own your data, you’re free to move it at any time, without interruption of service.

You give people and your apps permission to read or write to parts of your Solid POD. So whenever you’re opening up a new app, you don’t have to fill out your details ever again: they are read from your POD with your permission. Things saved through one app are available in another: you never have to sync, because your data stays with you.

I think “never have to sync” sounds a bit optimistic… this is going to require apps to start thinking in whole new ways about data (and their lack of ownership of it)… and how would you build something like Facebook on top of Solid POD?

Very curious to see where this goes. The current “everything is a silo” approach sure has it’s downsides.

Kubernetes for personal projects? No thanks! RB

I believe that someone that is paying 5$ a month to run a side project shouldn’t be concerned about infra (yet). I would recommend you focus on what you are building. Every minute you are spending on improving the infra (for uses cases that you might not use), you could be spending on coding a new feature, fixing that bug that you’ve just discovered, or writing more content for your website.

Good points.

San RB

SAN aims to be a simple open configuration format that’s easy to read due to obvious semantics.

I like it.

Researchers Identify Hundreds of 'Selfie Deaths' RB

between October 2011 and November 2017 there were English-language media reports of at least 259 separate “selfie deaths” in 137 separate incidents. The leading cause of death identified from the reports was drowning… [ED: emphasis mine]

Drowning, eh? Better think twice before snapping your next beautiful Instgram post poolside.