TIL you can debug Nix builds interactively in the sandbox itself

A deep dive into the convoluted and fascinating story of one of the most important keys on the keyboard

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

A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004

For one of my network storage PC builds, I was looking for an alternative to Flatcar Container Linux and tried out NixOS again (after an almost 10 year break). There are many ways to install NixOS, and in this article I will outline how I like to install NixOS on physical hardware or virtual machines: over the network and fully declaratively.

Debugging Gradle tasks can be challenging, especially when you have no access to tools like Develocity or need to work offline. This post shares a couple of strategies to help you gain more insight into your Gradle build.

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.

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.

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.

Timezones are insane

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

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.

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.

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

Being able to make slides with Compose sounds fun!