20 random bookmarks

@msfjarvis@androiddev.social's personal link log, mostly revolving around tech and tech-adjacent culture.

2025-03-22

66.

When you deleted /lib on Linux while still connected via ssh

tinyhack.com/2022/09/16/when-you-deleted-lib-on-linux-while-still-connected-via-ssh

Some clever tricks you can employ to salvage an essentially un-salvageable machine. I learned a lot of new things from this!

2025-03-11

63.

20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 1)

ploum.net/2024-10-20-20years-linux-desktop-part1.html

2025-03-07

62.

The Balatro Timeline

localthunk.com/blog/balatro-timeline-3aarh

A retrospective post about how #Balatro came to be, straight from its creator. Very helpful knowledge for budding game devs to learn the process behind having their own indie hit!

2025-03-04

61.

The Hierarchy of Hazard Controls

www.hillelwayne.com/post/hoc

Insightful post from Hillel Wayne exploring how to apply the Hierarchy of Hazard Controls they learned about from a mechanical engineer to a contrived example in programming.

60.

Avoid the nightmare bicycle

www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/03/03/the-nightmare-bicycle

Short and to the point post about designing things with a little trust in your users to intuit a relatively easy model rather than papering over the slightest complexity with things that erase the mental model of the underlying concepts.

2025-03-01

59.

How CouchDB Prevents Data Corruption: fsync

neighbourhood.ie/blog/2025/02/26/how-couchdb-prevents-data-corruption-fsync

Very neat explanation of how databases work hard to keep your data safe. I was surprised to learn about the failure mode of reading from page cache twice and the database convincing itself that the data has been written out even though it really hasn't.

2025-02-07

52.

Stifle Hungry Tasks using BuildService

www.liutikas.net/2025/02/06/Stifle-Hungry-Tasks.html

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.

2024-12-14

47.

JVM Anatomy Quirks

shipilev.net/jvm/anatomy-quarks

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.

2024-12-01

45.

Kotlin trick: writing shared Enum utility code

whtwnd.com/p-y.wtf/entries/Kotlin trick: writing shared Enum utility code

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.

2024-11-29

44.

Storing times for human events

simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/27/storing-times-for-human-events

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.

43.

hi, i made some frogs for your desktop

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Fxw1DqZaYA

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

2024-10-30

41.

Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone

ssoready.com/blog/engineering/truths-programmers-timezones

Timezones are insane

2024-09-19

32.

Using YouTube to steal your files

lyra.horse/blog/2024/09/using-youtube-to-steal-your-files

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

2024-09-03

29.

Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods

www.somethingsimilar.com/2013/01/14/notes-on-distributed-systems-for-young-bloods

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

2024-08-30

28.

The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

eieio.games/essays/the-secret-in-one-million-checkboxes

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.

2024-07-26

22.

Restic Backups on NixOS

www.arthurkoziel.com/restic-backups-b2-nixos

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

2024-07-18

20.

Code is run more than read

olano.dev/blog/code-is-run-more-than-read

Great read on understanding the incentives behind software development.

2024-07-05

14.

Kowloon Walled City: An Illustrated Guide

aftermath.site/kowloon-walled-city-cross-section-illustrated

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

2024-07-02

11.

On Burnout, Mental Health, And Not Being Okay

ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/on-burnout-mental-health-and-not-being-okay

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

2024-06-09

2.

Stupid Slow | The perceived speed of computers

www.datagubbe.se/stupidslow