Formal education in programming is surprisingly useless. Some people with a formal education in 'Computer Science' (and let's be honest, it's more of an art than a science) can tell you about set theory, but can't pick an appropriate database for a project. They can tell you when to represent a number with hex, but …

I see a standard story, repeated in FOSS spaces. It starts with an exchange. Open source projects are not actually as anarchic as people think. They work very much like a corporation, with a single person in charge, in pyramid. I hear these repeated gripes that people do not understand open source development, but it …

IT documentation has a disease: in-text links. The disease-inducing thinking is quite clear: someone writing the documentation writes 'install the drivers for your graphics card', and then provides a link to how to install graphics cards because they saw others do that sort of thing. But once you accept the general …

Could you drive the car over to my sister's place? Then she'll give you the KEYS once you're there. What a confusing request! What keys could this person mean? The car KEYS, for the car that she needs. You'll get the KEYS once you're there. Now you have found the confusion - this person is not thinking clearly. You …

We - the open source zealots - talk a lot about corporations with unkind interests quashing the movement, pushing their proprietary code, and violating everyone's 'privacy'. We don't talk much about push-back from coders, but it exists, because writing in the open is scary. We can say to engineers, 'your users will be …

I am a morlock - a naturally technocratic creature, comfortable with the darkness. When the pandemic hit, I heard the shock waves across the internet, and noticed every day how little my life had changed. It was at times, almost a nice excuse to sit and tap on the keyboard, and make dinner slowly to the sound of Nine …

Can we stop pretending it's the 80's? I like Unix-style programs. I like the expectation of a manual with every program, instead of every programmer coming up with their own way to telling people how something works. I like being able to ignore licences, and there's no better licence to ignore than the GPL - it will …

Anglophone reporting on the current Serbian political situation has been a general failure of the ears and eyes. Every report I've seen only elucidates the strength of the reporters' political prescriptions. One of the worst distortions I've come across was listening to The Rest is Politics - a political podcast, by …

Over the years, I've become convinced, that 'backups' are a bad paradigm, and should be left to edge-cases. We should instead focus on 'synchronization' where possible. Where backups say 'make a copy, on tape, place it in the basement, and lock it tight', they immediately have to follow this statement with '...and …