The story of Slack continues and is now at a point when Slack arguably started to deteriorate. Interesting to read the positively-put background of the time.

This sucks for Troy, is an excellent example of how even experts can be fooled and make mistakes.

We are destroying software. Hard to disagree with most of these.

I was iPad-only for a similar period of time until moving to be mostly laptop (Ubuntu) during the working day about 18 months ago. Matt’s thoughts generally align with my own.

Interesting thoughts on getting a European Cloud.

AoNZ needs to be thinking and doing more about this too - although if there was a strong European Cloud choice, that would make it less urgent, particularly since our values (re: privacy for example) align more with Europe than the US.

Continuing with the analogy, Charms & Juju are:

I use any brand of instant coffee (Nescafé, store-brand) and don’t need a coffee maker at all.

In the cloud ladder.

(The thing I like most about the coffee analogy is that the coffee snobs will say only #1 is acceptable and engineering snobs will say only #1 is best, and in both cases it always depends on the specifics).

Nice post on what the hyperscalers are selling that smaller players can’t.

Charms are furniture in this example, although kitset mostly now, since you need a Juju to run them somewhere.

A nice ‘falsehoods’ list, for languages, but examples would have been great.

Rings very true:

The other story is much more typical, and it goes something like this: I’d love to leave, but there’s something keeping me. One more year and I’ll get a new title, and then I’ll be so well-placed for a new job. I’ve heard the market is bad, so I should wait until it picks up again. I’ll get a raise soon, then I’ll negotiate for a new job. I’m scared of keeping up with mortgage repayments. I just need a year to finish up this project, it’ll look great on my CV. My network is terrible, so I don’t have the same options open to me. I think I can make a difference if I’m given a few more months.

In two years, this second approach has never gone well. Never, ever, ever.

This advice on getting jobs is long but feels right. Although not for Canonical, and I’m definitely not an expert here, more the schmuck who sees himself in the quote above.

Five basic rules from Lesley Carhart:

• Computers are good at detecting computer-automated stuff, and should be used for this as much as possible.
• Computers are not great at detecting novel human-driven stuff, and they never will be. Particularly abuse of authorized tools and access.
• Adversary goals to intrude into networks will never change.
• Adversaries will always invest in both AI tools and large human work forces.
• Keeping both these rules in mind, we will always need human defenders to keep up with novel human techniques, and to improve our automation-detecting and task-automating tools.

[“At the end of the day, where you stand on “shitty code” depends on your primary goal:

Are you shipping a product and racing to meet user needs? Or are you building a reusable library or framework meant to stand the test of time?"](https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/2/20/ugly-code)

I did open-source before the “forges” had pull requests and the like, but not after Git became dominant. Many of these ways to submit changes are new to me.

Interesting thoughts on optimising for “normal” engineers.

Interesting insight into S3, in a PM-ish kind of way.

I’m not clear on the difference between guaranteed minimum income and a UBI here, but it’s nice to see this is where some of that Stack Overflow lucre is going: blog.codinghorror.com/the-road-…

Interesting idea about getting AI to fund open-source via docs. I can’t see any of the companies doing this, though.

TIL you can pass strings to Python’s help() to get help on things you couldn’t pass as an object.

Whatever the legal truth is, and the philosophical truth of whether a machine reading vast amounts of truth to then be able to produce new text is different than a human doing it, the moral truth is clear: taking content from people who are often poorly paid to become rich yourself without giving back is wrong. www.theatlantic.com/technolog…

Nice reworking of the famous ‘favourite commit message’.

Interesting comments on CVSS with regards to curl.

I’ve used CVSS much more than published but also find them frustrating when there is expert local knowledge fighting with broad corporate policy. They’re fine as a component in figuring out risk but not the one answer.

In the name of security, we’re pushed to having dependencies and keeping them up to date, despite most of those dependencies being the primary source of security problems.

And

The goal of code in many ways should be to be written in a way that it does not need updates. It should eventually achieve some level of stability.

From “Build it Yourself”

The other thing I increasingly see is pulling in a big library when needing a small chunk of it. Somewhat similar to:

when you end up using one function, but you compile hundreds, some alarm bell should go off

In this post on executive purchasing there’s this bit that rings so true:

Software engineering and other specialties of a technical bent (including artists, writers, etc.) have the additional barrier that our skills are testable to some degree, but this is not the case for most senior management and executive roles. In those roles, it is essentially impossible to work out whether someone’s tenure as a manager or executive was useful.

Mozi feels like one of those tools built by a group of people who just don’t live in the same world as most of us.

A reimagined social networking (not media) that is like a next level contacts plus calendar would be great. But I want it for the people in my local area, not people I might see once a year. And it needs to be way more seamless.

Interesting backstory of the rise of GitHub (and Git).

How Hard Should Your Employer Work To Retain You

Nothing to quote; it’s too good. Just read the whole thing.