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Charity Majors at Honeycomb

The Second Edition of Observability Engineering Is Here

The second edition of Observability Engineering is available for download on our website.

Marc Brooker

Is this blog written by AI?

Is this blog written by AI? No. None of the human-readable text on this blog is written by AI, and I have no plans to change that. The weird grammar, incorrect assumptions, spelling errors, and annoying tics are all mine. Including the em dashes. I don’t use LLMs for writing. On this blog, or in my professional life. I...

Will Larson

Revised rules of engineering leadership.

From early 2014 through late 2020, I was working in hypergrowth environments, which are challenging, but also educational. The most valuable feature of hypergrowth is that your mistakes reveal themselves next month rather than next year, because things go wrong very loudly when you’re moving fast. I’ve been thinking a...

charity.wtf

AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

If you lived through the shift from handcrafted server pets to immutable infrastructure, you should sense something oddly familiar about what's happening now.

Ken Shirriff

The adder at the heart of Intel's 8087 floating-point chip

In 1980, Intel released the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster. As well as arithmetic and square roots, the 8087 computed transcendental functions including tangent, exponentiation, and logarithms. But it all depended on a 69-bit adder: "The arithmetic heart of the...

Oxide and Friends 1:28:23

The Hardest Kind of Unsafe Rust

We love Rust for how much the compiler helps enforce safety. But sometimes it's up to us to uphold the complex--and often unclear--expectations of what constitutes safety on our own. Oxide colleague, Rain, joins Bryan and Adam to talk about the technical details of what it takes to impose safety on the hardest type of...

Embedded 1:09:19

527: At The Jellyfish Conference

Chris and Elecia talk about pushing out of their comfort zone, networking advice, adding STARs and action verbs to resumes, using rust, thermo forming plastics, soldering together audio gear, and winning awards. If you are looking for an update to your resume or are interviewing for a new job and you haven't heard of t...

Hackaday Podcast 53:37

Ep 373: GPS, Danger In Space, and Robby the Robot

Last week, Elliot got his foot stepped on by a 1.5 metric ton draft horse, and boy is he glad to be back to the relative safety of podcasting! Joining him today is Jenny List, no stranger to farm life, who has been trodden by a cow. It's going to be one of those podcasts, folks. Another thing the two hosts have in comm...

Fork Around and Find Out 56:08

Suing The Government with Cindy Cohn

Come find Justin in-person and get FAFOFM stickers!Devopsdays - Portland, OR - September 8-10. Get 20% off tickets with FAFOFMEdgecase - Gooiland Hilversum, NL - September 24Taloscon - Amsterdam, NL - October 15-16KCD UK - Edinburgh - October 19Kubecon NA - Salt Lake City, UT - November 9-12Have an opening? HIRE AUTUMN...

Oxide and Friends 1:18:27

This Old Repo: LLMs and the Restoration of BattleTris

Bryan and Adam discuss the process of restoring a software project--BattleTris--untouched and unbuilt in over 20 years! How did LLMs help restore code Bryan started in the mid-1990s and what does that teach us about developing and maintaining software in the future?Your hosts were Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal.Prev...

Ken Shirriff

Powering up a module from the IBM 604: an electronic calculator from 1948

1948 was an interesting time for computing. For decades, businesses had used punch card equipment that added and sorted electromechanically. Now these electromechanical relays and counting wheels were being used to build room-filling general-purpose computers such as Harvard Mark I (1944) and IBM's SSEC (1948). But slo...

Hackaday Podcast 59:59

EP 372: Pop Tubers, Shifty Semiconductors, and Shelving Shelf Labels

This week, we're shaking things up a little, with Tom Nardi still in the host seat, and someone besides Al Williams in the other, namely Kristina Panos. In Hackaday news, we have a new Frikkin' Lasers Challenge going on now, although we acknowledge that no one can actually enter their project into it at the moment. We...

charity.wtf

AI enthusiasts are in a race against time, AI skeptics are in a race against entropy

Both sides are grappling with a real existential threat, and both sides feel like they are screaming into the void. Here's how to close the gap and get everyone pulling in the same direction.

Ken Shirriff

Microcode inside the Intel 8087 floating-point chip: register exchange

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster. This chip was highly influential, and today most processors use the floating-point standard introduced by the 8087. The 8087 uses complicated algorithms to accurately compute functions such...

Hackaday Podcast 1:19:42

EP 371: Space Computers, Spy Phones, and So Long CHU

Elliot Williams is out where the deer and the antelope play for the next week, so it's up to Tom Nardi and Al Williams to wrangle this episode of the Hackaday Podcast. They'll start off by reading some listener messages before talking about the slow extinction of time broadcasts, Linux on cheap smartphones, microcontro...

Embedded 1:01:09

526: Take A Taste Of Engineers

Dr. Victoria Serrano spoke with us about STEM outreach, fostering curiosity, and inspiring students with engineering education. Victoria is a professor at the Technological University of Panama (her faculty page: UTP | Dra. Victoria Serrano). Her youtube channel is CIATEC PANAMA which talks about circuits, electronics,...

Oxide and Friends 1:02:26

Rooting for the Home Team with Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel

Two years ago we introduced listeners to the Oakland Ballers, the startup returning baseball to the city of Oakland. Bryan and Adam were joined again by Paul Freedman and Bryan Carmel to discuss the Ballers first two--highly successful--seasons, and to announce some exciting new collaborations between the Ballers and O...

Ken Shirriff

Reverse engineering circuitry in a Spacelab computer from 1980

Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle, providing lab space for astronauts and experiments. Spacelab was controlled by a French-built minicomputer, called the Mitra 125 MS. Unlike modern computers, this computer didn't contain a microprocessor chip. Instead, its 1...

Hackaday Podcast 1:16:16

Ep 370: Softer Cyberdecks, a Simulated Clutch, and an Overstuffed Mailbox

With Elliot back from Hackaday Europe, he and Al Williams had a lot to talk about with two weeks of Hackaday posts to catch up on. Not to mention the mailbag was overflowing. This week, the guys look at girlie cyberdecks, a 3D printed circuit board, and talk electric motorcycles. Is 3D printing safe? Want an accurate m...

Marc Brooker

Agentic software development hypothesis

Agentic software development hypothesis This is the quality content you come here for, right? Agentic Software Development Hypothesis: Weak form: Any coding task for which a complete specification is available will become trivial. Strong form: Any coding task for which a deterministic oracle is available will become tr...

Marc Brooker

What's Easy Now? What's Hard Now?

What’s Easy Now? What’s Hard Now? Take it easy. This is the fourth in a series about how AI is changing software development, after It’s time to be right., What about juniors?, and My heuristics are wrong. What now?. It stands alone, but if you found this interesting you may also find those interesting. I’ve been spend...

Oxide and Friends 1:06:56

The Tale of Reverso

Oxide ships a rack scale system--how to test the manufacturing of the backplane and switches? Previously we've been using a collection of sacrificial servers, but this was unwieldy, expensive, and unscalable--all big problems as we ramp up manufacturing to 100s a month! Enter "Reverso", an extremely simple test fixture...

Embedded 1:03:00

525: Some Sort of Metal

Dr. Tom Williams spoke with us about robots, ethics, teaching, and books. Then we talked about mines, umpires, water, and more books. Tom is the author of Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice (free at MIT Press: Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice!). As part of the discussion, we talked abo...

Fork Around and Find Out 59:28

Taking Down Prod with Eve

Come find Justin in-person and get FAFOFM stickers!Devopsdays - Portland, OR - September 8-10. Get 20% off tickets with FAFOFMEdgecase - Gooiland Hilversum, NL - September 24Taloscon - Amsterdam, NL - October 15-16KCD UK - Edinburgh - October 19Kubecon NA - Salt Lake City, UT - November 9-12Have an opening? HIRE AUTUMN...

Oxide and Friends 1:29:21

AI in Computer Science Education

AI is an existential topic for all aspects of education--for none more so than Computer Science. Bryan and Adam were joined by Kathi Fisler and Shriram Krishnamurthi, professors of Computer Science at Brown, to discuss their experimental introductory course that strongly incorporates agentic programming. What do studen...

Hackaday Podcast 1:08:05

Ep 369: IR, E-Ink, and Avgas

In this episode, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off by discussing the latest reason that cheap PCB fabrication isn't quite as cheap as it once was. The conversation will then move on to hacking electronic shelf labels, stylish e-ink status displays, cutting metal at home with high current a...

Oxide and Friends 1:24:31

Mechanical Engineering at Oxide [chapter images]

Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the Oxide mechanical engineering team to talk the mechanical challenges of building a rack-scale computer, and--in particular--of scaling manufacturing from just a few racks to hundreds. NOTE: Keep an eye on the chapter art for the pictures under discussion.In addition to Bryan...

Oxide and Friends 1:31:24

Are LLMs Insufficently Lazy?

Brogrammer Garry Tan has been boasting about "writing" tens of thousands of lines of code each day as the paragon of productivity. Is this really the right way to think about building systems? Bryan and Adam were joined by Polish software engineer, Gregorein, who took a closer look into what Tan was generating to discu...

Hackaday Podcast 42:44

Ep 368: A Pencil that Draws Against You, 3D Printing Stuff, and Tablet, Shmablet!

This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over the international tubes to bring you the latest news, mystery sound results show, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous seven days or so. Regarding Hackaday Europe, we announced the last round of speakers and opened up the workshop ti...

Marc Brooker

It's time to be right.

It’s time to be right. Outcomes continue to matter. Earlier this week, I spoke at AI Dev 26. This is what I spoke about there. I’ve been making money, in some form, building software for nearly 30 years. The last five months have been the most exciting of that entire time. I’m extremely optimistic about the future of s...