Hasnain says:

“Unlike his splashy announcement videos, however, when Elon Musk fails to deliver on the wild and absurd promises he regularly makes, no one in the mainstream media is there to cover it. Things are different this time, however. Now, instead of a handful of technology writers being the only witnesses to his hype collapsing, nearly 290 million Twitter users are looking on in horror while the vast majority of people who will never join the platform are laughing from afar.”

Hasnain says:

Yikes.

“Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired.

Hasnain says:

Great read.

“However, all this data and processes need to happen on a server and, of course, we used AWS for it. A few years of growth later, we’re handling over 70,000 pages per minute, storing around 560 million pages, and paying well over $1,000,000 per year.

Or at least we would be paying that much if we stayed with AWS. Instead, we were able to cut costs by 80% in a little over three months with some out-of-the-box thinking and a clear plan. Here’s how you could too.”

Hasnain says:

This is nominally focused on developers but honestly the advice generalizes. Good writing and communication is so important.

“We all write things. Most of the time what we write isn’t very impactful — a reply to a random email, quick banter with friends on Discord, a birthday card to a distant relative.

It starts to matter, and matter a lot, in a professional setting. When what you write is read by your co-workers, your manager or your manager's manager, it helps everyone if your writing is clear, concise and empathic.”

Hasnain says:

Harsh, but really well written and argued. Definitely worth a read.

“I say this with utter confidence because the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems. Twitter, the company, makes very little interesting technology; the tech stack is not the valuable asset. The asset is the user base: hopelessly addicted politicians, reporters, celebrities, and other people who should know better but keep posting anyway. You! You, Elon Musk, are addicted to Twitter. You’re the asset. You just bought yourself for $44 billion dollars.

The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.

What I mean is that you are now the King of Twitter, and people think that you, personally, are responsible for everything that happens on Twitter now. It also turns out that absolute monarchs usually get murdered when shit goes sideways.”

Hasnain says:

Can’t wait for the inevitable Netflix documentary on this a decade later.

“Studey said she just wants to have the sites unearthed and for the victims to have a proper burial, and for any family to be notified.

As Studey proved she could find the abandoned well, despite the dogs getting hits on the areas she named, and her story hasn’t changed in the decades she’s told it, authorities are more willing to listen to her.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking this for the future, need to somehow collect all the RSS feeds for these blogs. I’ve been slacking on my reading.

“This list also doesn't include blogs that mostly aren't about programming, so it doesn't include, for example, Ben Kuhn's excellent blog.

Anyway, that's all for now, but this list is pretty much off the top of my head, so I'll add more as more blogs come to mind. I'll also keep this list updated with what I'm reading as I find new blogs. Please please please suggest other blogs I might like, and don't assume that I already know about a blog because it's popular. Just for example, I had no idea who either Jeff Atwood or Zed Shaw were until a few years ago, and they were probably two of the most well known programming bloggers in existence. Even with centralized link aggregators like HN and reddit, blog discovery has become haphazard and random with the decline of blogrolls and blogging as a dialogue, as opposed to the current practice of blogging as a monologue. Also, please don't assume that I don't want to read something just because it's different from the kind of blog I normally read. I'd love to read more from UX or front-end folks; I just don't know where to find that kind of thing!”

Hasnain says:

Apple starting their security research blog with a bang. This was super detailed, explaining various types of memory corruption bugs, the types of things they targeted, designing secure memory allocators, and adopting them at scale. I learnt a ton from this one.

“We hope that security researchers who are studying and developing defensive mitigations find this post to be a helpful case study of what it takes to transform a powerful idea like type isolation into a world-class implementation that is fast, memory-efficient, and practical enough to adopt at billion-device scale.”

Hasnain says:

Great read. Protocols are… fuzzy

“The common theme here is that even these well-known protocols, HTTP and JSON, can exhibit strange behavior or unexpected cases. These are not necessarily “bugs” that prevent the system from operating as intended. Programmers are good at making things work and overcoming obstacles! But often a programmer can only control one end of their connection, and so it doesn’t matter what the spec says – the way they get their job done is by adapting the code to the truth of what goes over the wire.”

Hasnain says:

“The new set-up compromised the Binance.US compliance officers’ duty to assess users for possible criminal activity, the four people said, as they were under pressure to not turn customers away. The compliance team also struggled to obtain customer data and documentation on Binance.US’s anti-money laundering policies. They often had to request the information from the main exchange, whose developers in Shanghai still managed the U.S. site.

On one occasion, a senior compliance officer told Shroder the team was lacking the resources to properly verify customers, the person recalled. In response, the person said that Shroder cursed and yelled at them, dismissing their concerns. As tensions with Shroder mounted in his first six months as boss, the employee quit, as did some 10 other compliance team members.”