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The best part of free software is it sometimes produces stuff you never would have been willing to pay to develop (Linux)...The worst part of free software is you get what you get, and the developers don't have to listen to you.

For decades, popular imaginings of the future have promised difference, but delivered more of the same: not only by recycling technical functions (the self-driving car, the robot housemaid) but, more perniciously, their underlying social relations.

I hate the expression “best practice”, it’s so, so often used by someone to justify the application of cargo cult without actually understanding why.

I realized a new process will not be sufficient. We got Scrum and ended up with Scrumfall. It is not the process that brings waterfall, but drivers beyond the process that forge our environment. How does that work?

We persuade our minds that liking pictures and joining virtual groups gives us a sense of belonging...In reality, we hire social media to distract our minds from our unpleasant, average life. And, by faking photos, to convince others, including ourselves, that our life is amazing while internally we are in pain.

Before my life after quitting social media, there was a chapter in my life where, I, too, thought that every meal and outfit had to be posed, captured, and tagged.

Actually writing about the topic you’re supposed to be writing about is strictly optional.

You see, relational databases aren’t dinosaurs. They aren’t lumbering prehistoric relics doomed to extinction by a changing world. They are sharks. Apex predators honed by millions of years of evolution into a perfectly adapted creature that is just as effective today as it was eons ago. There is a reason they are still around, and their supremacy in their domain hasn’t been questioned.

...there’s much more to deliberate practice than 10,000 hours. Read this to learn how to accelerate your learning, overcome the “OK” plateau, turn experience into expertise, and enhance your focus.

the biggest difference between an occasional contributor and a core developer lies in the knowledge about the physical architecture of the project. Roughly, it takes 2x more time to write a patch if you are unfamiliar with the project, but it takes 10x more time to figure out where you should change the code.

Cryptography can be a hard subject to understand. It’s full of mathematical proofs. But unless you are actually developing cryptographic systems, much of that complexity is not necessary to understand what is going on at a high level.

Say, the first generation works on thing X. After X is done and becomes popular, time passes and the next generation of programmers comes and works on Y, based on X. They do not need to know, exactly, how X is built, why it was built that way, or how to write an alternative X from scratch.

On a spectrum from Homer Simpson to Albert Einstein, how much of a genius-level move was it really for Carmack to add binary space partitioning to Doom?

Progress is exponential, not linear. So we overestimate the impact of a new technology during the early days when it is just finding its feet, then underestimate its impact in a decade or so when its full uses are emerging.

In this post I'm going to introduce you to the basics of memory allocation...At the end of this post, you should know everything you need to know to write your own allocator.

Even though there is a lot of circulation online about making a personal SWOT analysis, the majority of the information is mainly focused on helping corporations. That’s why I decided to make a less complicated guide to help individuals do the following: Figure out what you’re good at and at the same time spot what you suck at so you can focus on the former.

The goal of this article is to provide a historical context of how JavaScript tools have evolved to what they are today in 2017.

To become a -10x engineer, simply waste 400 engineering hours per week. Combine the following strategies:

Analytics have allowed me to double-down on artistic weirdness. They also pull me towards getting you addicted to the screen.

Connecting with a book is so much about being the right reader in the right place at the right time. You have to feel free to skip things, move on, and maybe even come back later. And you have to feel free to say, 'It wasn’t for me.'

You should, intentionally and tactically, decide which piece of information you can do without, for now. But you should also, intentionally and strategically, decide when to pay back that debt.

Every senior person in an organisation should be aware of the less glamorous - and often less-promotable - work that needs to happen to make a team successful. Managed deliberately, glue work demonstrates and builds strong technical leadership skills. Left unconscious, it can be career limiting. It can push people into less technical roles and even out of the industry.

In this post, I'll walk you through everything you need to know about logs, including what is log and how to use logs for data integration, real time processing, and system building.

It’s counterintuitive, but once you understand it, you’ll have deeper insight into the behavior not just of CPUs and database thread pools, but also grocery store checkout lines, ticket queues, highways – really just a mind-blowing collection of systems.