Tag Archives: Tech

The IEEE Spectrum has a lovely article about the origins and early history of PostScript and how it jumpstarted desktop publishing and arguably digital printing. Most Irreal readers probably know the rudiments of the story. PostScript was developed at Adobe … Continue reading →

Fred Brooks was a computer scientist who, among other things, worked on the development of OS/360. He’s probably best known for his influential book The Mythical Man-Month, which has itself obtained a mythical status within our industry. The TL;DR of … Continue reading →

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about developers threatening a suit against Microsoft/GitHub/Copilot for copyright violations. The issue was that the AI assistant Copilot was “suggesting” code that was an exact copy of copyrighted code without attribution. That post … Continue reading →

Manu Cornet worked at Google for 14 years and recently moved to Twitter (he’s since been caught up in the great Twitter purge) and has an interesting discussion of the differences in the companies’ cultures as seen from a staff … Continue reading →

I’ve written several times about my use and affection for finite state automata in programming. It’s amazing how often it can reduce a complex problem to a triviality. The first stage in taking advantage of this method is to draw … Continue reading →

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 →