20 random bookmarks

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

2025-10-16

89.

Nix: Connecting to the sandbox

bmcgee.ie/posts/2025/10/nix-connecting-to-the-sandbox

TIL you can debug Nix builds interactively in the sandbox itself

2025-09-10

85.

Sick systems: How to keep someone with you forever

issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html

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…

84.

Simple Sabotage Field Manual by United States. Office of Strategic Services

www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26184

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.

2025-08-27

79.

Forklifts Require Training

www.zacsweers.dev/forklifts-require-training

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

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.

2025-04-23

69.

You wouldn't steal a font

fedi.rib.gay/notes/a6xqityngfubsz0f

Or would you?

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!

2025-03-04

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.

2025-02-20

58.

The origins of Firefox

vmst.io/@jalefkowit/114037556786892479

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

57.

What is the post launch Discovery Queue – How To Market A Game

howtomarketagame.com/2025/02/19/what-is-the-post-launch-discovery-queue

Super interesting look into the #Steam discovery queue system and the impact it has on your game's visibility on the platform

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.

2025-01-28

50.

DeepSeek: The Greatest Growth Hack of All Times meets its David in a Chinese Quant

centreforaileadership.org/resources/deepseeks_narrative_attack

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.

2025-01-14

49.

Why is Git Autocorrect too fast for Formula One drivers?

blog.gitbutler.com/why-is-git-autocorrect-too-fast-for-formula-one-drivers

Fun dive into the history of Git's autocorrect feature

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.

2024-08-01

25.

A Story About Jessica

harihareswara.net/posts/2024/a-story-about-jessica-by-swiftonsecurity

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.

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.

2024-07-05

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.

2024-06-24

8.

How TED talks became the Picotop of millennial intellectualism

www.joanwestenberg.com/ted-talks-the-picotop-of-millennial-pop-intellectualism

2024-06-17

4.

Are we really engineers (Part 1)

www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers