Kind bookmarks

It’s 11:43pm on a Monday night. My 6-week-old son is asleep in my office so my wife can get some uninterrupted rest for the first half of the night. He’s finally asleep now, and I probably should be also after a full day of work. But I’m not done for the day. Even though I’m a software engineer by trade, I’m also a computer programmer by hobby and passion. So I do what I’ve been doing for well over a decade now: I boot up my computer to write some code.

The best-case scenario is that you annoy the maintainers.

Renovate documentation.

Over 6 years ago, I made up an unscientific personality quiz as a joke…and people can't help themselves—they're still filling it out! Here's what they think

There are many good reasons to not go to every talk possible when attending conferences. However increasingly it became hip to boast about avoiding going to talks – encouraging others to follow suit. As a speaker, that rubs me the wrong way and I’ll try to explain why.

The Diátaxis framework solves a problem of quality in technical documentation, describing an information architecture that makes it easier to create, maintain and use.

Has development of your favorite open source project stalled? Triage is sometimes a great way to get things moving again!

Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.

Some tactics for writing in public

Add demos to a #demo-friday channel in Slack or Teams.

"Stick to boring architecture for as long as possible, and spend the majority of your time, and resources, building something your customers are willing...

Nobody cares about your blog, but you should keep writing!

Starting to explore what a true "static micro blog" might look like.

I was thinking about how recently (other than the weeknotes), my blog posts have been mostly reviews of stuff I've been watching/playing/reading/etc and I haven't made any posts about blogging or tech …

Software secrets are targeted by malicious actors. Here are three key steps to mitigate risk — and best practices you can take to prevent future breaches.

I'm not going to act like an expert on labor organizing. I didn't have that term in my vocabulary four years ago. Now it's one of the anchoring aspects of my life and something I'm deeply passionate …

How one process helped us decrease our error rate 17x in one year.

An exclusive interview with the four researchers behind a new developer productivity framework: The three dimensions of DevEx

Building evolvable software systems is a strategy, not a religion. And revisiting your architectures with an open mind is a must.

We implemented OAuth for the 50 most popular APIs. TL;DR: It is still a mess.

One reason I like working at startups is you get to wear many hats. Of course, by "wear many hats" I really mean "suffer occasional periods of extreme stress when things fail and there are no grownups you can go to for help". I like to think of it as Extreme Learning.

I was in one of those interminably dull video-conferences a few weeks ago. The presenter was pitching their grand vision of what our next steps should be. "So!" They said, "Any comments before we …

Mastodon won't be the next Twitter, and it's not because of Bluesky. The ideals and execution won't scale.

I'll resume writing about technology and software engineering, inspired by Jamie Tanna's blog I came across recently. This is my blog: https://manuelschmidt.net. Subscribe through your favorite feed reader, or follow me on social media.

For many open source consumers the "logical units" being depended on are libraries. However, the libraries themselves are only a product of what consumers are actually depending on: people. Y...

Let's talk about Google's newest software supply chain product. Reading the GA announcement I had many mixed feelings. Starting with the good, compared to other implementations of "curated open s...

Posted by Jesper Sarnesjo and Nicky Ringland, Google Open Source Security Team Today, we are excited to announce the deps.dev API , which...

<p> Running live demos can be stressful. You know what you want to say and show. You prepare the CLI commands you want to run to best showcase what you...

The company claims to have not considered before launch whether their new protest and strike surveillance tool could be misused.

A few days ago, a stressed-out gamer confessed on ResetERA he was considering giving up on gaming, as he felt the time spent could be put to “better” use. The thread somehow struck a chord here, not …

I hated writing in high school. It wasn’t objective like my favorite subjects, math and science. It also didn’t help that we had to write about old, hard-to-understand literature like Shakespeare. But my perspective on writing changed once I started working full-time as a software engineer.

relicensing and lack of resources for maintainers are only two top-level issues plaguing open source

Wherein I argue that you should plan to regularly put in the work required to keep your dependencies up-to-date, because doing so gives you more predictability and control for the same overall effort.

This controversial decision coupled with poor messaging has created anxiety the Open Source community. Learn what's happening and how we can move forward.

Watch out for these common pitfalls when using tmux and environment variables and learn how to avoid them.

In general we all live roughly 4000 weeks on this planet. I lived most of mine up already and reading this makes me think.

I am furious. Though I try not to humour conspiracy theories, or suggest that there is any grand overture to what is usually an uncaring and cold world, but I cannot ignore what is a transparently-synchronized movement against the tech industry’s workforce.

How it is now in your best interest to act.

Why the hell do I keep being asked to do this?