This happened to you: you’re having a nice day, minding your own business, then an ad (or person) pops up saying: “Improve your… — This happened to you: you’re having a nice day, minding your own business, then an ad (or person) pops up saying: “Improve your productivity by 700% with this one simple trick! Won’t you try it? I mean, come on” It can be a tool, a gadget, a method or an…

This week I faced a moral problem when planning a rewrite of a part of our system. The problem was, I recently read a post by Joel Spolsky… — This week I faced a moral problem when planning a rewrite of a part of our system. The problem was, I recently read a post by Joel Spolsky that said that rewriting your code is, and I quote: the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make

Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, commonly considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, was very skeptic of… — Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, commonly considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, was very skeptic of philosophy in general. He thought that many philosophical questions were really just misunderstandings, by the philosophers, of the way language works.

In my last post I talked about anti-fragility, which is a way to design software systems that can successfully cope with the complexities… — In my last post I talked about anti-fragility, which is a way to design software systems that can successfully cope with the complexities of the outside world. This time I want to talk about the internal complexity of our systems, and how to avoid it. To start off, how do…

All too often we find ourselves deploying software that works flawlessly on our the drawing board, only to see it underperform or fail in… — All too often we find ourselves deploying software that works flawlessly on our the drawing board, only to see it underperform or fail in production. Sometimes it happens quite fast, other times it takes a while. The problem is, shipping a complete system to production after only testing it locally…

A name can say a lot about something. For example, CJS and ESM. — A name can say a lot about something. For example, CJS and ESM. To read “CJS”, you read every letter, understand its reference, and go on. C(ommon)J(ava)S(cript). “ESM” is a bit different. When I first looked it up I found that “ESM = ES module”. Gee, thanks. What’s ES? well…

The actual story of the Buddha, as told to programmers. — This is the actual story of the Buddha (as told to programmers), and how over 2500 years ago he invented functional programming. Well, that’s clearly false. The Buddha didn’t know the first thing about computers and programming, he lived way before they were invented. …