Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-11.


Joint statement of scientists and researchers on Age Assurance

Tags: tech, law, surveillance

This is (IMNSHO) a very important open letter. This confirms to me that the whole set of age verification laws we’re seeing popup everywhere is severely misguided. Had my suspicions before of course but it’s getting clearer with this one. We should stay clear from those laws as a profession, it’s important to not comply, it’d be a disservice to our users.

https://csa-scientist-open-letter.org/ageverif-Feb2026


Secure Communication, Buried In A News App

Tags: tech, cryptography, security, privacy, journalism

Not sure it’ll keep being efficient if the political heat keeps going up. Still this is a nice idea.

https://hackaday.com/2026/03/09/secure-communication-buried-in-a-news-app/


LibreOffice criticizes EU Commission over proprietary XLSX formats

Tags: tech, data, foss, law, europe

We should indeed put an end to those proprietary formats. It’s sad to see the EU Commission contradict itself there.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/LibreOffice-criticizes-EU-Commission-over-proprietary-XLSX-formats-11202165.html


Tags: tech, foss, ai, machine-learning, copilot, values, commons, law

Excellent piece, indeed legal is not the same as legitimate. More often than not the law is lagging behind and things might be wrongly “fixed” at a later date. In that interval that’s when our communities need to build its own tools to protect the commons. We’re clearly reaching such an inflection point. Interestingly, I think there’s is a difference of reaction between the people with a Free Software culture and the ones with an Open Source culture.

https://writings.hongminhee.org/2026/03/legal-vs-legitimate/


Do the Illegible

Tags: tech, programming, engineering, ai, machine-learning, copilot

Obviously the essay from Peter Naur keeps popping up lately. It feels like an important piece, especially in the current atmosphere of vibe coding. This article lays out quite well why vibe coding is the opposite of what we should be doing.

https://ashwinsundar.com/posts/legibility-and-programming/


Moonforge

Tags: tech, linux, embedded

An initiative to monitor I guess. There’s clearly a need for a more “opinionated” setup for Yocto based embedded systems, this is going in that direction.

https://moonforgelinux.org/


The hidden compile-time cost of C++26 reflection

Tags: tech, c++, reflection, metaprogramming

Interestingly the issue for the compile time is not so much the feature itself but the STL headers required. It makes PCH pretty much mandatory.

https://vittorioromeo.com/index/blog/refl_compiletime.html


How to stop fighting with coherence and start writing context-generic trait impls

Tags: tech, rust, type-systems

Looks like an interesting approach to lift some of the limitations around the Rust trait system. The learning curve doesn’t look too great though, clearly requires effort to get into.

https://contextgeneric.dev/blog/rustlab-2025-coherence/


Parametricity, or Comptime is Bonkers

Tags: tech, zig, rust, type-systems, generics

Interesting look at Zig’s comptime feature. It’s not a purely Zig post though, does a good job of explaining parametricity and the implications of loosing it.

https://noelwelsh.com/posts/comptime-is-bonkers/


Ensuring correctness through the type system

Tags: tech, type-systems, safety

A good illustration of making illegal states unrepresentable. This definitely helps with code safety.

https://lindbakk.com/blog/ensuring-correctness-through-the-type-system


SPA vs. Hypermedia: Real-World Performance Under Load

Tags: tech, web, frontend, complexity

Probably somewhat self serving so the numbers would need to be confirmed with other experiments. That said that case gives a good idea of the price in terms of complexity and resources when choosing to go for an SPA.

https://zweiundeins.gmbh/en/methodology/spa-vs-hypermedia-real-world-performance-under-load


FontCrafter: Create Your Handwriting Font for Free

Tags: tech, fonts

This is definitely a cool project. I like the idea.

https://arcade.pirillo.com/fontcrafter.html


Code Reviews Do Find Bugs

Tags: tech, codereview, science

In praise of code reviews. This article does a good job showing all the advantages if properly managed. Teams have to pay attention to latency but otherwise you get lots of benefits for not so much time spent.

https://entropicthoughts.com/code-reviews-do-find-bugs


On The Need For Understanding

Tags: tech, programming, culture, hacking, debugging, complexity, foss

Yes, we have lots of layers nowadays. But you can read them to figure out when something doesn’t work like you expect. This is one of the most important skills of the trade.

https://blog.information-superhighway.net/on-the-need-for-understanding


The story of one of my worst programming failures

Tags: tech, system, programming, failure

There’s always an interesting lesson in this kind of failures. Here clearly it is in part a story of unchecked trust, and not planning for a bigger system. It came with real consequences too.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/DevelopedTooSmallFailure


Prioritize Relatively

Tags: leadership, management, project-management

The point is interesting. Priorities are indeed relative and dynamic. It’s impossible to put an “absolute priority value” on what needs to be done.

https://boz.com/articles/prioritize-relatively


Autonomy and Clarity in Leadership Styles

Tags: leadership, management, organisation

Interesting framework of different leadership styles. They all come with their own pros and cons of course.

https://bjorg.bjornroche.com/management/autonomy-vs-clarity/



Bye for now!