Web Review, Week 2025-42
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.
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
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!