Tag Archives: Tech

If you do software development work, your job title almost certainly is some variation of “software engineer”. It’s a ubiquitous way of describing a developer role. So much so that it hard to see how it could be controversial but … Continue reading →

Today I got a text from a friend who is not from the Hacker culture. The text described a series of tasks he had just performed that were a canonical example of yak shaving. He didn’t know the term, of … Continue reading →

Back in January, I wrote about the story of a developer who automated his job with some scripts and then spent the next few years pursuing his own interests at work while letting his scripts do his job. Many people … Continue reading →

The first data structure I learned and really internalized was the hash table. I’ve been using them my entire career and, given when I started, that meant implementing them myself. This was before I learned C and even C doesn’t … Continue reading →

A few days ago I wrote about the excellent video of David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan discussing AWK and its history. In the video, Kernighan mentions that he’s been working on enabling Unicode in the One True AWK. Here’s a … Continue reading →

Recently, I wrote about a Janet Jackson song that could cause laptops to crash. That turned out to involve frequencies from the song that resonated with a critical frequency in the disk subsystem and was solved simply by installing a … Continue reading →