29 December 2021

41 links ยท Wednesday

The SQL Game | ROWS & TABLES

SQL Game. Complete beginners are introduced to data science the best way, through play, in an easy to learn card game format – no computers needed. Ideal for families, classrooms, and anyone looking for a game that can also teach and reinforce real-life skills…

Computer Engineering for Babies

Computer Engineering for Babies is a simple board book to introduce the basics of digital logic to kids (and adults).

Lessons from my PhD

Lessons I learned during my PhD that can be applied to virtually any job.

Fintech firm hit by Log4j hack refuses to pay $5 million ransom

One of the largest Vietnamese crypto trading platforms, ONUS, recently suffered a cyber attack on its payment system running a vulnerable Log4j version. Soon enough, threat actors approached ONUS to extort $5 million and threatened to publish customer data sho…

CRUD API + Complexity = Death by a 1000 Papercuts

Focusing on CRUD API (Create, Read Update, Delete) and Entities force yourend-users to perform the business logic and workflow themselves. Meaning they must ...

You can't copy code with memcpy; code is more complicated than that

Back in the day, a customer reported that their program crashed on Itanium. Wait, come back! Itanium is where the customer recognized the problem, but it applies to all other architectures, so stick with me. Their code went roughly like this: struct REMOTE_THR…

Why Engineers Should Invest in Decision-Making Skills Early — Reforge

Early in our careers as engineers, we’re told to invest in technical skills. We learn languages, implement patterns and frameworks, architect across the stack, and learn how to scale. Getting into the weeds of the work is what gets you credibility and clout wi…

A year or monitoring production

The end of the year is closing fast, and I run into the following metric (below). What you can see here is one of our RavenDB production instances over the p...

glibc is still not Y2038 compliant by default

Most of my readers are probably aware of the Y2038 issue by now. If not, it refers to 3:14:07 UTC on January 19, 2038, when 32-bit time_t will overflow. The Linux kernel has internally switched to …

The Sunshield Webb/NASA

The James Webb Space Telescope (sometimes called Webb or JWST) is a large infrared telescope with a 6.5-meter primary mirror. Webb will be the premier observatory of the next decade, serving thousands of astronomers worldwide. It will study every phase in the…

‎iVerify. - Secure your Phone!

‎iVerify is your personal security toolkit. Use iVerify to manage the security of your iOS device and detect modifications to your smartphone. iVerify makes it easy to manage the security of your accounts and online presence with simple instructional guides.

New Discourse forum for GoboLinux

We are happy to announce a new GoboLinux forum, powered by Discourse! This will be a new venue for users and developers alike talk about Gobo and help each other out, replacing our previous channels such as the mailing list.

2021 in Running

As another year is coming to an end I’m curious: What has my running looked like this year? I did something similar in 2020 as well as in 2019.

import attrs

An attempt at catharsis.

Why I stopped publishing end-of-year most-read lists

I’ve not published the yearly Most Read article in the last three years. I stopped sharing readership numbers as the lists were used to steal my best works.

Saving the Internet

David Pierce wrote a deep profile, over 4,000 words, for Protocol and asks the question in the headline, Can Matt Mullenweg save the internet? Which brings to mind Betteridge’s law of headlin…

Auditing a Graded Video Game – Zdziarski's Blog of Things

Anyone who’s read my blog knows that I am not a fan of video game grading. Grading companies, in my experience, do marginal quality work, and at a superficial level that cannot be audited once an item has been sealed. The holy plastic WATA box is all too often…

How I Build

My idea of a vacation might be weird to some. Sure, I like sunshine, I like beaches – but more than all that, I like making stuff with computers.

Can blogging be made simpler?

as much as I love my blog, suggesting others start their own like I did is too tall a technical ask. The hosted options come with their own pitfalls. Is there a better way? What might it look like? How do we get there? Over the past few years I’ve advised many…

Secrets of MicroPython: How to blink an LED

What is the "hello world" of embedded software? Why, blinking an LED, of course! In this first tutorial, we'll get you acquainted with the fundamentals of MicroPython and more importantly, the online simulator we'll be using for all the tutorials. That's right…

How to Choose Your College Degree

Some pragmatic ideas on how to decide what to study during college, tailored to the job market of the 2020s.

How bad are bad fundraising terms?

Suppose you took a job at Square in November 2014. A stock option package you valued at $500k then would have become worthless a year later, when they IPOed at less than half their previous valuation. Yet it seems like Square did quite well in 2015. What’s goi…

An Algorithmic Solution to Insomnia

I’ve struggled with insomnia for all of my adult life. It began in college and has waxed and waned in severity ever since, correlating with stress levels but not entirely.

Home - Moshe Karmel

The (Minimalist) Site of Moshe Karmel