The more software eats the world, the more critical safety is … but what exactly does that mean?

Software engineers are bad at safety because software engineers are not used to the idea that software can injure. All around the industry, the mantel of technical leadership has been passed to people about my age, perhaps a few years older. We grew up when computers weren’t so powerful, when their use was an optimization rather than a necessity, when their first commercial successes were in toys. …

Why are organizations committed to positive ideals so often shitty to their employees?

I have a checklist of things I talk to new hires joining my team about during our first 1:1. Top of that list is the word boundaries double underlined. By the end of that first conversation I want to have covered the importance of three different categories of boundaries I consider absolutely essential to doing any kind of social impact based work.

Internal boundaries: How you treat yourself. Getting enough sleep, eating right, getting regular exercise, etc. Everybody’s different here and what I want from my employees…

Why do some programming languages feel neat and orderly and others seem loaded with inconsistencies?

When I first started trying to write my own programming language I was surprised by how difficult it seemed to be to find best practices on language design. In an industry filled with opinions, where people will fight to the death over tabs -vs- spaces, there isn’t much guidance for would-be program language designers.

Eventually I came to my own conclusions: the pathway to success with program language design is to think of programming paradigms as logical groupings of abstractions and be as intentional about…

I’m very excited about this. A few months ago I decided to start keeping an audio diary of my experience trying to learn how to design a programming language. In a few weeks I’m inviting you to start this strange journey with me through parsers, grammars, data structures, and the like. Along the way, I’ll interview researchers and engineers who are active in the this space and go deep on areas of programming not typically discussed. Episode 1 drops on November 18th.

I don’t want to overwhelm my regular readers with a long series on the ins and outs…

Maybe magic markers really *are* a best in class data access control tool.

When I was asked to start the Identity team at Rebellion Defense my first thought was “do we need a whole team to do that?” After all, we weren’t going to build our own sign-on system when there were so many companies that focus on identity as their core product. It seemed like all that needed to be done was to select the appropriate tool, set it up and make sure it was maintained. That should be simple.

But to paraphrase the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz…

Before ‘cyber’ was a prefix for everything internet and computers, it was how mathematicians were going to conquer the world.

I first encountered the word cybernetics while reading Benjamin Peters’s account of the Soviet Union’s attempts to invent the internet, How Not to Network a Nation (still a little disappointed that MIT didn’t spell it Nyetwork, come on!) At the time my reaction to it was “Ew gross” — anything with the prefix cyber- feels cheesy and passé — followed by confusion. The dates seemed impossible. Cybernetics actually predated both the internet and the rise of the computing industry by…

How small engineering teams can build distributive systems

I actually really love monoliths. But I’m the sort of engineer that wants my tool box to be full of tools, even weird looking ones that only become useful in very specific circumstances. The advice I typically give people about maintaining technology is to embrace the inevitability of Conway’s Law and factor in team structure, composition and size into architectural decisions. Small teams tend to build monoliths because small teams tend to be monoliths.

Monoliths also offer slightly better performance than service based architectures. At least at first. It’s only once products…

Fear, loathing and failing up in technology

This is one of my favorite USDS stories: Very quickly in my career at USDS I developed a reputation for being a person you could send out an SOS distress call to, not so much inside USDS itself but externally with contractors and different government partners. There’s a fair amount of backstabbing in the government, even in the civil service. Whenever you chose to reach out to a 3rd party to ask for help you were taking a risk that the person you reached out to would screw you over. …