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Will Larson

Early and late-stage hypergrowth.

Last week, a colleague asked why I’d hired an additional new leader onto an important area rather than expanding an existing leader’s scope to incorporate that area as well. The existing leader was a known quantity and doing well, so why not keep expanding them? It’s a good question, and depending on the circumstances...

Hackaday Podcast 58:36

Ep 367: Radioactive Weather, Continuous Pickles, and Moon Junk

When Elliot Williams and Al Williams compare their notes on the week in Hackaday, you know you'll get at least one or two bad puns. How bad? Tune in and find out. This week, Tom Nardi visits several in-person events, and Elliot and Al talk about smart buttons, Itanium, ejecting things from a rocket, and the infinite pi...

Fork Around and Find Out 1:10:46

Laying the Foundation with Joe Beda

Fork Around and Get EmailSponsor FAFOFM"Everyone is a beginner at one point." Even one of the creators of Kubernetes. If you're listening to this podcast then Joe has had an impact on what you do. He's worked on everything from Internet Explorer 6, Google Cloud Platform, and Kubernetes. You can partially blame him for...

Ken Shirriff

The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker

Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets, or the sun. While celestial navigation is accurate, cannot be jammed, and doesn't require any broadcast infrastructure, it is a difficult and time-consuming process to perform ma...

Hackaday Podcast 53:36

Ep 366: DOOM on a Toaster, Music in LED Strips, and Old Drives in New Clothes

It's the evening before publication, and a pair of Hackaday writers convene to record the week's podcast. This week Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List, and it's a bumper episode! Of course, a bit of Hackaday news makes the cut, as it's time to make an entry in the Green Powered Challenge. Then we make the first of...

Embedded 1:14:23

524: This Isn't a Movie

Nathan Jones spoke with us about hardware security, motivation, conference talks, and writing. Nathan wrote an in-depth series of posts about the benefits of superloops vs RTOS: You Don't Need an RTOS (Part 1), Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. He also wrote about How Hardware Gets Hacked (Part 1) and Part 2 which discusses...

Will Larson

Agents as scaffolding for recurring tasks.

One of my gifts/curses is an endless fixation with how processes can be optimized. For a brief moment early in my career, that was focused on improving how humans collaborate, but that quickly switched to figuring out how we can minimize human involvement, and eliminate human-to-human handoffs as much as possible. Late...

Hackaday Podcast 1:22:04

Ep 365: Early 3DP Engineering, a New CAD Interface, and Flying Around the Moon

Humans flew around the Moon this week, but Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi were stuck on Earth -- luckily, there was no shortage of stories and hacks to keep them occupied. From the news that Linux might be putting the i486 out to pasture, to the fascinating potential of the threadless ball screw and con...

Marc Brooker

Spec Driven Development isn't Waterfall

Spec Driven Development isn’t Waterfall Write down what you mean. After spending a few months writing (e.g. on the Kiro Blog), and speaking (e.g. Real Python Podcast, SE Radio) about spec-driven development, I’ve noticed a common misconception: spec driven development is a return to a waterfall style of software develo...

Oxide and Friends 1:26:12

Building a Quorum of Trust in the Oxide Rack

The Oxide rack contains within it a distributed system that needs to trust itself. But how is this trust built? Bryan and Adam were joined by colleagues Andrew and Finch to explore how Trust Quorum was designed, built, and verified.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide colleagues, An...

Hackaday Podcast 48:32

Ep 364: Clocks, Cameras, and Free Will

This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over assorted beverages 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. In the news, there's quite a bit to talk about. Regarding Hackaday Europe, you can rest assured that t...

Hackaday Podcast 48:32

Ep 364: Clocks, Cameras, and Free Will

This week, Hackaday's Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met up over assorted beverages 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. In the news, there's quite a bit to talk about. Regarding Hackaday Europe, you can rest assured that t...

Embedded 1:10:42

523: Bad Experience With Donuts

Chris and Elecia chat about Leapfrog toys, things they like, large company politics, awards, and open source governance. The Toy Story 5 Trailer with LilyPad toy which is suspiciously similar to the LeapFrog LeapPad tablet. Which is different from the original LeapPad which had cartridges and capacitive touch (capaciti...

Ken Shirriff

The rise and fall of IBM's 4 Pi aerospace computers: an illustrated history

The morning of April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, the Space Shuttle thundered into the Florida sky. Commander Young and Pilot Crippen were at the controls as the Shuttle ascended on its first flight. But the launch, like much of the flight, was really under the cont...

Will Larson

The agentic passive voice.

At some point, you will have learned about the passive voice, where the actor in a sentence is unclear. For example, my software didn’t compile. That’s a good example of the passive voice. However, you might not know the full set of rules, because here are some sentences in the passive voice that you might not recogniz...

Marc Brooker

What about juniors?

What about juniors? Start at the beginning. Last week I wrote about how the role of the most senior tech ICs has changed. Today, I wanted to share some thoughts on a more difficult topic: how the role of junior software engineers, folks just starting out on their career, has changed or will change. First, the good news...

Fork Around and Find Out 1:02:25

Training The Future with Mark Russinovich

Sponsor FAFOFMDon't FAFO with cloud disaster recovery. Do it right with Arpio.Have a podcast you need help with? Reach out to HumblePod.Mark is the CTO of Azure and has decades of experience exploring the internals of systems. As a developer and person responsible for running massive AI infrastructure, Mark has a lot o...

Marc Brooker

My heuristics are wrong. What now?

My heuristics are wrong. What now? More words. More meaning? Some people who ask me for advice get a lot of words in reply. Sometimes, those responses aren’t specific to my particular workplace, and so I share them here. In the past, I’ve written about echo chambers, writing, writing for an audience, time management, a...

Oxide and Friends 1:24:09

When Nine Nines Isn't Enough

Bryan and Adam were joined by members of the Oxide team to describe the multi-year search for a mysterious source of hardware failures. All related to an ultra-reliable--and yet still not reliable enough--component.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by members of the Oxide team: Nathanael...

Marc Brooker

Music To Build Agents By

Music To Build Agents By I don't have this problem, because I don't use a mouse. Press play, then start reading: Want to learn how to think about agent policy? Start with Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling. So come along, you old broomstick! Dress yourself in rotten rags! You’ve long been a servant; Obey my orders now! When I...

Will Larson

Judgment and creativity are all you need.

When I joined Imprint a little less than a year ago, our deploys were manual, requiring close human attention to complete. Our database migrations were run manually, too. Developing good software is very possible in those circumstances, but it takes a remarkable attention to detail to do it. It was also possible to dev...

charity.wtf

Your Data Is Made Powerful By Context (so stop destroying it already)

In logs as in life, the relationships are the most important part. AI doesn't fix this. It makes it worse.

Embedded 54:40

522: The Information Is In Poop

Sonia Grego speaks with us about a topic no one likes to talk about, but could be used to monitor personal dietary health and widespread disease outbreaks. Toilets! Sonia leads Duke University's Smart Toilet Lab and the spin out Coprata which makes the Microbiome Activity Tracker. As discussed in the show, when develop...

charity.wtf

My (hypothetical) SRECon26 keynote

One year ago, Fred Hebert and I delivered the closing keynote at SRECon25. Looking back on it now, I can hardly connect with how I felt then. Here's what I'd say one year later.

Oxide and Friends 1:45:49

Oxide's $200M Series C

Oxide raised a truckload of capital a few weeks ago to fund the business for the foreseeable future. Bryan and Steve describe the raise, and Adam poses the best the best (and worst) questions scraped from Hacker News.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, we were joined by Oxide CEO, Steve Tuck.Previously on...

Fork Around and Find Out 1:15:54

Developing Measurements with Cat Hicks

SoCal Linux Expo - discount "FAFOF" -https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/Kubecon EU Amsterdam - https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/Linuxfest North West - https://linuxfestnorthwest.org/Newsletter - https://sub.fafo.fm/Dr. Cat Hicks takes a different approach to traditional engineer productivity...

Marc Brooker

SFQ: Simple, Stateless, Stochastic Fairness

SFQ: Simple, Stateless, Stochastic Fairness Roll the dice. .subtitle { margin-bottom: 15px; color: #666; font-size: 14px; } .container { display: flex; gap: 20px; flex-wrap: wrap; justify-content: center; } .sim-wrapper { display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: center; } .sim-wrapper h2 { margin: 0 0 10px 0...

Embedded 1:03:10

521: Are You The Tiny Domino?

Kenneth Finnegan entertained us with stories about accidentally contributing to the internet's ability to network. Wondering how the internet works? All those terms about IPv4, IPv6, BGP, OSPF, CDN and other alphabet soup? Check out the YouTube videos by NetworkChuck. Kenneth writes about his adventures on his blog, Th...

charity.wtf

First I wrote the wrong book, then I wrote the right book

I'm not sure whether to say "thank you" or "HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME", but this one goes out to all the people who sent me advice on buying software last fall.

charity.wtf

Martin Fowler told me the second edition should be shorter (it's twice as long)

90% new material, a clearer mission, and a rogues gallery of contributors. The second edition of Observability Engineering is almost done.