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

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

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

A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.