Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-42.

Free Software hasn’t won

Tags: tech, foss, licensing, law, politics, business

It’s a bit of a sour article but it rings so true… We let Open Source take the mantle in companies which are mostly free loaders and churn closed products, or even worse have them closed and DRM protected. There’s really quite some work to still realize the Free Software goals.

https://dorotac.eu/posts/fosswon/

How to encrypt your device, like a boss

Tags: tech, storage, cryptography, tools

Tiny intro to using cryptsetup. I confirm it’s surprisingly easy.

https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_007.pdf#page=63

The Attack

Tags: tech, security

An old one but it shows quite well how social engineering works. It’s often way more powerful than the technical defense you try to raise.

https://shaanan.cohney.info/2013/04/the-attack/

Casting shade on your Postgres performance

Tags: tech, databases, postgresql, performance

This article is short but very interesting. That’s indeed something to keep in mind when using Postgres, you could have surprisingly bad performance results in some cases otherwise.

https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_007.pdf#page=35

Abstraction, not syntax

Tags: tech, config, complexity, yaml

A reminder that if there’s too much complexity in your configuration the syntax used to represent it probably won’t save you from issues.

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2025/abstraction-not-syntax

Lua is so underrated

Tags: tech, programming, language, lua

Indeed it is. It’s not the perfect or most sexy language, and yet it has some interesting properties.

https://pagedout.institute/download/PagedOut_007.pdf#page=37

Can We Know Whether a Profiler is Accurate?

Tags: tech, profiling, research, java

Interesting approach to gauge how accurate a profiler is. With some results in the Java ecosystem, so now you know which profiler to pick there.

https://stefan-marr.de/2025/10/can-we-know-whether-a-profiler-is-accurate/

Complex Object Initialization Optimization with IIFE in C++11

Tags: tech, c++, design, performance

This is an interesting pattern that I still seldomly meet in C++ codebases. Of course don’t go overboard with it, but don’t be scared of using it for wrong reasons.

https://articles.emptycrate.com/2014/12/16/complex_object_initialization_optimization_with_iife_in_c11.html

API design principle: Don’t tempt people to divide by zero

Tags: tech, api, design

Good reminder that it’s better to design your APIs to avoid putting people in the situation of inadvertently creating a divide by zero.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251013-00/?p=111677

Gamma correction on fragment shaders.

Tags: tech, graphics, colors, shader

Wonder what is gamma correction and why it’s needed? This is a nice and short explanation.

https://riccardoscalco.it/blog/gamma-correction-on-fragment-shaders/

HTML’s Best Kept Secret: The

Tag

Tags: tech, html, accessibility

Interesting tag… It’s indeed been totally forgotten somehow.

https://denodell.com/blog/html-best-kept-secret-output-tag

Goto Fail, Heartbleed, and Unit Testing Culture

Tags: tech, tdd, tests, security, team, culture

A very long read but contains lots of insights. Goes from two very famous security related failure, to highlighting how a test first approach could have helped. It then finishes with a long section on how to foster a testing culture in an organisation.

https://martinfowler.com/articles/testing-culture.html

Why we’re leaving serverless

Tags: tech, cloud, performance, complexity

Serverless based architectures leading to bad cases of complexity and latency when used for more than trivial workloads… who knew!? ;-)

https://www.unkey.com/blog/serverless-exit

Don’t make Clean Code harder to maintain, use the Rule of Three

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, refactoring

Apparently people need to be reminded that “Don’t Repeat Yourself” is more a guideline than a rule. So “The Rule of Three” is a way to do that (although I find ironic it’s called a “rule”).

https://understandlegacycode.com/blog/refactoring-rule-of-three/

Emergent Design

Tags: tech, agile, xp, design, history

What’s behind the notion? Some historical musing about self-organizing teams and the design they produce.

https://ronjeffries.com/xprog/articles/emergent-design/

How we do large scale retrospectives

Tags: tech, agile, retrospective

A few interesting ideas for having retrospective at a larger scale than the single team.

https://engineering.atspotify.com/2015/11/large-scale-retros

All-Remote Meetings

Tags: tech, remote-working, meetings

Once again GitLab has plenty of good advice for operating remotely. This time it is about meetings which are obviously part of life in an organisation. And actually, quite some of the good tips also apply to in person meetings.

https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/culture//all-remote/meetings/

No Silver Bullets: Why Understanding Software Cycle Time is Messy, Not Magic

Tags: tech, productivity, research, team

Interesting stuff, very rich I think I’ll have to get back to it. This gives good clues and ideas of metrics to look at when evaluating teams output. Some of the findings confirm hunches which is welcome. It also shows that measuring productivity keeps being a messy business, there are so many factors influencing it in some way.

https://johnflournoy.science/no-silver-bullets/

Hiring Trap: Don’t Hire Anyone Older Than…

Tags: tech, hiring

I still think we have an ageism problem in our industry. I feel it’s less than before, but this short article shows well how far it went.

https://www.jrothman.com/htp/hiring-process/2014/03/hiring-trap-dont-hire-anyone-older-than/

The Humane Tech Interview

Tags: tech, hiring, interviews

I’m trying to approach interviews like this as well. It’s better for everyone when it feels like a conversation rather than constant questioning. The trick is to still capture information about the skills you need to evaluate though.

https://www.thelins.se/johan/blog/2017/07/the-humane-tech-interview/

Bye for now!