"I can't think of a single large software company that doesn't regularly draw internet comments of the form “What do all the employees do? I could build their product myself.” Benjamin Pollack and Jeff Atwood called out people who do that with Stack Overflow. But Stack Overflow is relatively obviously lean, so the general response is something like “oh, sure maybe Stack Overflow is lean, but FooCorp must really be bloated”. And since most people have relatively little visibility into FooCorp, for any given value of FooCorp, that sounds like a plausible statement. After all, what product could possible require hundreds, or even thousands of engineers?"

A solid read, if fairly obvious to anyone without a massive ego, and some real world experience.

"This article is about how pipes are implemented the Unix kernel."

A good read.

Cool guy and hilarious website.

"COMMITTED TO TRANSPARENCY! International and transgalactic organizations require transparency and openness-- Acme is proud to offer FULLY TRANSPARENT Klein bottles that are OPEN and VISIBLE. We certify that NOTHING IS HIDDEN INSIDE YOUR ACME KLEIN BOTTLE!"

"This oath has become more difficult to follow as vehicles have become more complex. Probably one of the most controversial topics among technicians is the probing and piercing wires and connectors. Some technicians curse t-pins and piercing probes claiming they can damage a wiring harness. On the other end of the spectrum are technicians that have zero problems stuffing a blunt multimeter lead into a connector for an ECM."

"The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops."

A good read, or at minimum, to the readers of this site, the middle is a good read.

A funny read, short and sweet.

"THE HOLE HAWG OF OPERATING SYSTEMS
by Neal Stephenson

Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it only by reputation, and its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems to agree that if it could only get its act together and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the onrushing invaders, it could stomp them (and all other opposition) flat.

It is difficult to explain how Unix has earned this respect without going into mind-smashing technical detail. Perhaps the gist of it can be explained by telling a story about drills."

"The process of selling a website had always been a mystery to me. Therefore, in this post I'll tell you what it was like to sell a tiny project, and how I think anyone can."

Recently I needed to sort a file of entries by the date in each entry, where the date was a human-readable string across a few whitespace breaks. The format of each line was like this:

But the most obvious sort command didn't produce results sorted in the expected order (2019, Sep [month], 5, 17:39:24). Let me show you after the break: