Writing / topic
Architecture, technical taste, and analogies that hold up.
For fifty years, engineers built the world on a promise: same input, same output, always. It was never entirely true, and where it was true it proved less than we thought. The tools we're shipping now won't let us pretend either way.
We've been shipping non-deterministic code for decades. We learned to live with it. Now we're scaling that chaos to production systems we can't understand, and hoping observability saves us.
stealmybitcoin.com dangles a Bitcoin key behind a /print-flag binary and a PHP user. I threw the whole nginx and PHP CVE catalog at it and got the same bytes back every time. A clean scan is a floor, not a verdict, and the real way in was somewhere I never looked…
Survival is not elegance. It is adaptation under pressure Nature has been running the longest continuous experimentation process in history…
“I used to think the em dash was a red flag. Not in a literary sense, but in a “your robot forgot to sound like you” kind of way. If someone…”
Over the years I have gone from a C++ in the early days building mathematical models for industrial processes to C#, Java, Python, briefly…
I inherited from my father a strong tendency to over-engineer everything I build. Generally, it's a good trait, but it comes with certain t…
Originally published at https://chrisballance.com/2017/03/28/abstract-guilds-of-craftsmen/ While driving back from lunch with a friend the…
This morning, my wife asked me to fix the printer so that she could print some forms. Sure, I could have spent a few minutes fighting with…