Today I learned that Firefox started as an act of protest from Mozilla engineers who hated the bloated product they were being forced to create

Super interesting look into the #Steam discovery queue system and the impact it has on your game's visibility on the platform

A great interview with Chris Person of Aftermath, who has over the course of the past 2 years has become something of a VHS decoding savant

Super interesting deep dive into why the Android calculator app is so much better than iOS', and the incredible amount of work Hans Boehm put into making it so. I have never been more interested in calculators than reading this post!

A great essay diving into an obscure font that is present all over New York City, and tracing its history all the way back to physical milling presses in the early 1900s. Both the information and its presentation are top notch

Oracle provides some incredibly powerful hardware for free and this post explains a very straightforward and easy to follow way to get set up with NixOS on their servers.

Gradle will always parallelize tasks to the maximum possible degree, which might not always be desirable when tasks have extreme memory and/or CPU usage and end up starving the whole build out. Aurimas shares a great trick with Gradle BuildServices that lets tasks have a maximum parallelism.

Highly interactive and beautiful view of some 100,000 books, it's hard for me to describe what makes it so great to me. Seeing is believing!

Great read on the state of the AI industry post the release of DeepSeek R1, which has shattered the idea of AI training only being available to the biggest players in the field.

Fun dive into the history of Git's autocorrect feature

A great round up of interesting stuff, mostly centered around C++

An ongoing mini-series documenting specific, often niche parts of the JVM. They're all pretty short and to the point, and the author encourages to treat them as chapters in a book as they reference each other quite often.

The creator of One Million Checkboxes is back with another fun experiment.

Some tips from P-Y to write handy utilities for enums like ensuring entries are sorted or that they have unique labels, in a generic fashion.

Simon Willison draws on his past experience working on event management websites to explain the real world problems that arise when you try to keep time for humans, along with actionable advice to minimize both your own and your users' suffering.

Beautifully written and illustrated video explaining shar's journey of creating a frog pond idler game

Great write up on password hashing techniques and their pros and cons

Timezones are insane

I've wanted to have consistent OpenGraph images for my website for a long time but did not want to involve any expensive-to-run services. The approach outlined here worked perfectly for what I needed.

Great vulnerability research but the highlight is definitely the hand-crafted interactive mock ups of Google websites

Anything I say about it will ruin the delight of experiencing this page for the first time.

A great summary of a paper that analyzed how medical professionals teach themselves to work around security hygiene that prevents them from doing their job. It's a great look into how people working on securing systems often overlook the day to day reality of how these systems are operated.

A somewhat dated but still quite useful list of things to look out for when diving into building distributed systems

A great read about a bunch of smart hackers who converged around the One Million Checkboxes game and started hiding secret messages inside it, their eventual discovery by the game's creator and everything they accomplished while the game was still up. Honestly made me a tiny bit emotional.

Super interesting stuff, it's wild how capable OpenType is.

SwiftOnSecurity wrote this in 2014, about a fictional teenager named Jessica and how general purpose computing let her down. Must read for everyone in tech.

Another great deep dive from the Netflix team on real-world problems they face as a primarily Java-oriented shop.

Surprisingly bullshit-free breakdown of all the considerations that went into creating a brand new front page carousel component for the JioCinema apps.

Super simple and straightforward guide to setting up backups on your NixOS machine via https://restic.net

Great read on understanding the incentives behind software development.

Airbnb has always felt sketchy about how they try to avoid responsibility for hosts but the deposition sheds light on just how deep this runs. Turns out not even sexual assault perpetrators are deemed as unsafe enough to be banned from being hosts on Airbnb.

Probably the most in-depth history of the events that led to the creation of Git by Linus. Great read!

Great read on why the distinction between technical and non-technical folks is simply meant to be exclusionary, and whether the word holds any weight at all.

Kinda wild to me that such a city could ever have existed outside the pages of Science Fiction.

Just beautifully written. I would recommend reading this even if you are in a good place mentally.

Businesses prioritizing shareholder value over everything else seems to have become the norm, but I didn't know how this insane sounding behavior started and this is a great history lesson on it.

Being able to make slides with Compose sounds fun!