Today I'm going to talk about a recent journey as a HotSpot Java Virtual Machine developer working on the OpenJDK project. While running tests for a new feature, I realized my Java objects and classes were arbitrarily disappearing! What followed was probably the most interesting debugging and fixing experience of my life (so far), which I wanted to share with the world.

Great post explaining how the software engineering industry has been walking into a potential labor collapse by alienating junior engineers.

Transcript of Mary Poppendieck's landmark presentation titled "The Tyrrany Of The Plan"

A quick look into the process of creating a font.

An old-but-gold debugging story of how canonicalization of Unicode can often give unpredictable and confusing results, when you don't actually know how the canonicalization process works.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.