My grandmother passed away last week. She was 85. Due to a series of poor choices1, compounded by the geriatric randomness, her last few weeks were spent in a county nursing facility. So the platitudes we all hear2 about “being in a better place now” are most certainly true. When I look back upon time Read More
Last week, Perforce’s Matt Attaway and I got into an interesting twitversation de-constructing our beloved “DevOps” word. It all started because I received an email from a recruiter with a job description referencing a “DevOps team”1, but with a description2 that sounded eerily familiar to the bread and butter of a build/release team. Matt suggested Read More
I recently read Tim Bray’s Software in 2014, a sort of “state-of-the-industry” post, including what to watch for in the upcoming year. It was a good read, but I found one of his observations, on the mobile space, interesting: The update cycles are slow. Days in the case of iOS, hours for Android (compared to Read More
Data-driven decision making. Since appearing on the tech scene about a decade ago1, it’s seemingly become all the rage in Valley management culture. It’s a pillar of the “lean startup” ethos. It’s alliterative. And it’s arguably become the dominant decision making paradigm, trumping even time-honored, classical engineering analysis, for established tech companies and startups alike. Read More
When I saw an ad1 for Betas, Amazon’s original comedy series about a group of Silicon Valley millenials building the next disruptive dating app, my curiosity was piqued. But after watching the first two episodes2, I have to say: Betas is completely unwatchable. The first two episodes cover what you’d generally expect: character exposition, contrived Read More
Our industry still insists on using MD5 checksums. And I don’t know why. Since 2004, it’s been widely reported that “the security of the MD5 hash function is severely compromised.” When talking about collision attacks in hash functions, the answer to whether or not they’re broken—and thus useless for the sole purpose we employ them—is Read More