20 random bookmarks

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

2025-11-04

91.

JVM exceptions are weird: a decompiler perspective

purplesyringa.moe/blog/jvm-exceptions-are-weird-a-decompiler-perspective

Deep dive into how JVM exceptions are implemented on the compiler level

2025-10-29

90.

Debugging Stories

github.com/danluu/debugging-stories

Miscellaneous collection of blogposts from people who had to debug some really strange computers.

2025-08-28

81.

Blocky Planet — Making Minecraft Spherical

www.bowerbyte.com/posts/blocky-planet

Discover the unique design challenges of creating a spherical planet out of Minecraft-like blocks.

80.

Frame of preference

aresluna.org/frame-of-preference

A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004

2025-04-27

70.

Creative usernames and Spotify account hijacking

engineering.atspotify.com/2013/06/creative-usernames

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.

2025-03-11

65.

20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 3)

ploum.net/2025-03-08-linux_desktop3.html

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.

2024-11-29

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.

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

2024-08-30

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.

2024-07-30

24.

Java 21 Virtual Threads - Dude, Where’s My Lock?

netflixtechblog.com/java-21-virtual-threads-dude-wheres-my-lock-3052540e231d

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

2024-07-06

16.

Properly Testing Concurrent Data Structures

matklad.github.io/2024/07/05/properly-testing-concurrent-data-structures.html

2024-07-05

15.

"Technical" skills

sashalaundy.com/writing/technical-skills

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.

2024-07-04

13.

Generative AI, Which Is The Future Of Art, Cannot Draw A Map Of The United States

aftermath.site/generative-ai-map-of-the-united-states

2024-06-10

3.

So you want to build a browser engine

robert.ocallahan.org/2024/06/browser-engine.html

2024-06-08

1.

CodeSandbox's approach to cloning microVMs blazingly fast

codesandbox.io/blog/how-we-scale-our-microvm-infrastructure-using-low-latency-memory-decompression