TIL you can debug Nix builds interactively in the sandbox itself

So you want to keep your lover or your employee close. Bound to you, even. You have a few options. You could be the best lover theyve ever had, kind, charming, thoughtful, competent, witty, and a tiger in bed. You could be the best workplace theyve ever had, with challenging work, rewards…

A historical publication written during the early 1940s amid World War II, "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" serves as a unique historical artifact that illustrates grassroots resistance efforts and the belief in the collective power of ordinary people during wartime.

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

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.

Or would you?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.