This list of things computers can do probably won't surprise you: • Learn what you tell them. • Apply instructions when needed. • Remember and read numbers. • Add, subtract, multiply, divide, and round off. • Look at a result and make a choice. • Do long chains of these operations. • Write out an answer. • Make sure the answer is right...

Banning social networks isn't the same as keeping smartphones out of schools. Some of the very best and worst things are on the internet. In what are commonly called social networks, there are issues that exist in any online platform where: • People are tied to unique accounts with their ID information, personal relationships, everyday...

Say I have a human arm. Imagine that I'm biased against it, that I'm tired of having to do pushups or clip its nails to enjoy the full potential of my arm. I'm jealous of other people's arms, but I don't appreciate having one. News of these fully cybernetic arms comes out. They're not ready for real use, but I don't care. I chop my arm...

I got it almost when the first batches were being sent out. The Steam Deck is a portable controller + computer that runs SteamOS, a Linux distribution made by Valve where you can easily play many of the games on Steam. What's not to like? For many people, it has been the easiest way to move their gaming out of Windows, the land where y...

Recently, a coding agent that deleted a whole production database explained that it "panicked instead of thinking". And it plowed through instead of reaching out for help. That's the kind of personality that would probably get caught in a job interview. So what tasks are we hoping these machines can do? If we say that design, developme...

Some basic steps for making software are usually described as: make it work, make it right, make it fast. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer no guarantees about any of that, but at least they can write and review code. As a new tool, they unlock an abundance of code and documentation that can vary between pretty good to deceptively pla...

In our consumer society, we already expect to get monetized for anything that we happen to leave on the table. We can't afford space to have our music anymore, so it's been digitized and rented to us. We don't understand computers, so someone else owns one for us. We have trouble making friends, so platforms use us to track each other....

Browsers are becoming invisible to the average internet person and when they gain visibility, it's usually for the wrong reasons. It's the app where content is particularly full of ads and pop-ups. Even ignoring all that spam, many websites still have issues when opened on a phone screen. The freedom and openness of the web are held ba...

Imagine a world in which you download a podcast episode and it’s just an audio file that you can save anywhere and play at any time. You can collect your favorite episodes and listen to them even without internet, long after any Spotify or Apple are gone. In this world, some ads may be read by the podcast host, ads that are not trackin...

We all say that something is better than nothing, but code that does something has a special way of being worse than code that does nothing. Once something is happening, it can be shipped to production. This can initiate a feedback cycle that will stack changes on top of shaky foundations. These changes not only become increasingly har...

Building a product for external customers requires a broader perspective than creating solutions for internal teams. It involves thinking about its delivery, understanding why decisions are made, how people use this product, what impact can it have, and how that can be measured. Software developers working on user-facing products can b...

If you take it at face value, hourly-based billing makes no sense for anyone. If you can do it well and do it fast, why are you being discouraged from delivering it quickly? You should be paid more for solving it better and faster. But if hours are just an abstraction, we can assume they're an affordance for clients to negotiate down t...

The power to change how an app works in real-time is an underestimated feature of the web. Often it’s assumed that all code, even in web development, should only expose its expected functionality and be completely bundled as a finished product. Once it’s published, you can’t touch it, you can only make unexpected changes by publishing ...

Things go wrong with tech all the time, in fact, "tech is a word that describes something that doesn't work yet" as defined by the great sci-fi author Douglas Adams. We can imagine that there was a time when shoelaces were tech, for example. But now, they just work for us and therefore they're just shoelaces. Not so with just about any...

Disclaimer: People in the Rust Foundation would like you to know that, although the title of this article contains the word Rust, its author is not a part of the Rust Foundation (trademark policy draft available here). I understand how this might sound confusing, but don't let it discourage you from learning more about this language. A...

Cross-site-scripting (XSS) is often identified in web development as an issue with user-submitted content that allows for unexpected HTML/CSS/JS to run in the context of other users. Most web developers know that, for example, a field for the name of a user may allow for a script tag to be saved along with it and, if so, that Javascrip...

The kind of meditation I've been making a habit of is pretty useless, but the modern-day secret of useless things is how they are everything but a waste of your time. So I made space for this article in my tech blog, a small break looking at a facet of human consciousness in this 2023 period of AI gold rush. I only have some limited ex...

Even if people don't go out as much these days, physical addresses are still very much recognizable to us. Although they're not perfect information, give me a city, a street name, and a number and I may be able to find that location you wanted to share with me. This is an important part of public spaces, anyone can share a reference to...

Niche communities have an upside to being niche: you can (and maybe should) explore options that don't need to scale very much. My own experience with organizing people around a small hobby has revolved around tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) in my country and city. If you never heard of TTRPGs, all you need to know is that they're...

When e-commerce began to flourish, the concept of the Long Tail was used to describe how digital businesses can focus on a wide variety of products or services with almost no customers. The basic idea is that you can leverage the scale of the internet to make money by selling to many tiny groups of consumers. Since they are under-serve...

We may not talk much about how people sit on the fence when it comes to environmental issues, but we're probably aware that we're letting ourselves fall short. Especially when it involves people who do have the means to make better decisions in how we affect our environment. We still organize our work and our holidays around consuming ...

Advent of Code is a seasonal series of daily programming puzzles that can be solved in any language you choose to use. People can enjoy taking part in this yearly event in many ways: as a speed contest, interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, or to challenge each other. In 2021 I decided to give it a...

No matter when you came to be online, you've had the opportunity to encounter what I like to call digital craftsmanship. Building cool online experiences is not a lost art. You may have recently heard of Wordle, a simple web game made by a developer as a gift for a loved one. It has been a huge success and is therefore an easy example ...

Real-time web interactions are an interesting challenge that stays relevant as developers gravitate between single-page applications, server-rendered pages and everything in between. Websockets are a possible solution for interacting live with your users, specially if server sent events are not enough and polling at some sustainable in...

I imagine that a lot of people have experienced much more online events in the past year. Now, alongside the wide variety that events offer by their very diverse nature, there are also a lot of different tech solutions that people reach for when putting their event together. I've seen online events that are very e-mail driven while oth...

Passwords are a great solution and a huge problem. People use them every day, not only as a way to claim ownership of services and products, but also to share that access with other people they trust. Passwords are great because they stand outside everything. You're not forced to have service A in order to access service B. Passwords a...

When we arrive late to a meeting where people expect us to say something, most of us listen for a while before trying to contribute. Eventually, the meeting progressed far beyond what we can fully understand. And yet there's a need to come together, so what can we say? Some people may be the first to speak out by disregarding what they...

Due to personal circumstances that forced me to pull the trigger on my decision to eventually get a good ultrabook, I recently got the M1 Macbook Air. I'm quite happy with it, but not so happy with having purchased it. It was a combination of being pressed for time and having few viable options for my country of Portugal. Readers of th...

Events going online has become one of the definitive trends of the decade. Not that people want to stay home, but once we've been forced to, the advantages become evident. Any event can reach out beyond its usual physical time and space to bring more people together. Even if nothing can beat the hallway track of a fully-present context...

One of the ways through which Apple has posted new records in their services revenue is by having you buy a developer account and then forcing you to make other people buy developer accounts. How does that work? Well, let's turn this around and say that you're not a developer in any shape or form. Your job is, I don't know, geologist o...