Let’s say that I ask you to calculate all the happy prime numbers between Planck’s constant and the speed of light expressed in meters per minute. Did you immediately start reciting numbers to me? Odds are that you did not. How accurately can you estimate the time it will take you to find those numbers? There are a number of problems encountered that slow progress and prevent estimation: Do you really understand what I have asked you to do?...

Photo by Martino Pietropoli on Unsplash Yesterday, I briefly interacted with Manuel Matuzović after reading his Mastodon post on his growing doubts over the shadow DOM in general. After almost a year working with web components I’m starting to doubt the usefulness of style encapsulation and shadow DOM in general. Styling and some accessibility stuff is so much easier without… Manuel Matuzović , August 17th 2023 @matuzo That’s how all of us enhance....

Have you ever considered becoming a product owner? Maybe you should. Product owners work with stakeholders to create a vision of the product they wish to create. They then work with the Scrum team and stakeholders to translate that product vision into an ever-evolving product backlog . Product owners have the tough job of choosing the highest priority work to do next to ensure they maximize the value they deliver to customers....

At Traceloop , we’re solving the single thing engineers hate most: writing tests for their code. More specifically, writing tests for complex systems with lots of side effects, such as this imaginary one, which is still a lot simpler than most architectures I’ve seen: As you can see, when an API call is made to a service, there are a lot of things happening asynchronously in the backend; some are even conditional....

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer....

I joined LinkedIn about six years ago at a particularly interesting time. We were just beginning to run up against the limits of our monolithic, centralized database and needed to start the transition to a portfolio of specialized distributed systems. This has been an interesting experience: we built, deployed, and run to this day a distributed graph database, a distributed search backend, a Hadoop installation, and a first and second generation key-value store....

But actually, I’m serious. People are rightly concerned about what is going on in the W3C with DRM , as couched in the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal. Please read Henri Sivonen’s explanation of EME if you haven’t yet. As usual for us here at Mozilla , we want to start by addressing what is best for individual users and therefore what’s best for the Open Web , which in turn depends in large part on many interoperating browsers , and also on open source implementations with a significant combination by number and market share among those browsers....

Last month I committed an act of technical rebellion: I bought one operating system instead of another. On the surface, this may not seem like much, since an operating system is something that can seem inevitable. It’s there when you get your machine, some software from Microsoft, an ur-condition that can be upgraded but not undone. Yet the world is filled with operating systems, it turns out. And since I’ve always felt that a computer system is a significant statement about our relationship to the world – how we organize our understanding of it, how we want to interact with what we know, how we wish to project the whole notion of intelligence – I suddenly did not feel like giving in to the inevitable....

Programming paradigms for dummies: what every programmer should know Peter Van Roy, 2009 We’ll get back to CIDR’19 next week, but chasing the thread starting with the Data Continuum paper led me to this book chapter by Peter Van Roy mapping out the space of programming language designs. (Thanks to TuringTest for posting a reference to it in a HN thread ). It was too good not to take a short detour to cover it!...

AI has recently crossed a utility threshold, where cutting-edge models such as GPT-3 , Codex , and DALL-E 2 are actually useful and can perform tasks computers cannot do any other way. The act of producing these models is an exploration of a new frontier, with the discovery of unknown capabilities, scientific progress, and incredible product applications as the rewards. And perhaps most exciting for me personally, because the field is fundamentally about creating and studying software systems, great engineers are able to contribute at the same level as great researchers to future progress....