DNA: The Code of Life At the most magical SHA2017 gathering I gave two presentations, “DNA: The Code of Life” and the followup, “DNA: More greatest hits” (slides). The first presentation was recorded by the wonderful CCC C3VOC streaming crew, the second one by my friend Bart Smit (who is also wonderful). Without...

(Don’t) drop the hint: communicating with technical people This post is a subset of the presentation “Escaping the data center — tales from a recovering manager”. Video, slides. When we communicate at the office, we frequently do not directly say what we mean. A common conversation might go like this “Hey John, we...

On IP address encryption: security analysis with respect for privacy Frequently, privacy concerns and regulations get in the way of security analysis. I’m a big fan of privacy, but I’m also a big fan of security and preventing people from getting hacked. If you are hacked you have no privacy either....

On Linux vDSO and clock_gettime sometimes being slow Like the previous post on this somewhat dormant blog, I want to share an oddity I discovered that no search engine could really find for me - even though once I found what the problem was, it turns out I was by no means the first person to discover this. Some...

So no matter how pretty your code, eventually someone will benchmark it and demand top performance. Squeezing microseconds is a very addictive and even destructive activity. It ruins your evenings, destroys your ability to converse with human beings and typically leaves your code in a mess. No programmer can escape...

A meandering walk through innovation that also reviews a book This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. I care deeply about innovation. It is literally where the future comes from, but it is a curious thing. Innovation and its more powerful partner, invention proceed at a snail’s...

How many hours for multithreading the server? Or: dealing with overly detailed project planning Many developers, me included, dread that moment. Someone sits down with you and wants to know how many “hours” each step of the project will take. And of course the thing is, if you are doing something that has been done...