The / thing is a serious case of legacy compat gone nuts. And it happens when you have an ecosystem and you need to keep things working in that ecosystem even as it evolves.

So, we have to go ALL the way back to CP/M an operating system most of you won’t ever have heard of but it was popular on a variety of devices in the late 70s and even into the early 80s.

CP/M has no directories, it’s for floppies, small ones at that. Well actually small in capacity, but they were usually the 8” huge floppies you…

I wanted to talk a little bit about securing C code, this came up a few weeks ago in a friendly twitter discussion and I said I would write something; so here it is.

Securing C is not an easy thing to do generally but we had pretty good success in Project Lightspeed. Now please don’t consider this a pwnme challenge: it’s not that. Nobody needs that in their life (see this if that excites you). But I think we ended up in a pretty good place and it is C, so I thought it would be worth it to…

I’m a big fan of unit tests. Really. Big fan. Super big. Massive. Like, “make unit tests great again” massive. That.

So when I was working on my FB project (https://cgsql.dev) of course I invested in a lot of tests. In fact there is about as much test code as there is code code. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. That stuff saves my life on a daily basis because when you’re working on any code, but maybe especially on a compiler, it’s really easy to hork things up. So the code has 100% line coverage and lots…

I thought I would write some notes on some old “networking” tech that I worked on in the early 80s. I have “networking” in quotes because it isn’t really like what you would call a modern network, this was more about sharing particular devices but in some sense the things we’re going to talk about are “switches”. This is the Microshare line of products. I’m doing this all from memory so there’s some chance I have some of the details wrong but I’m confident this is substantially correct.

The general need here was to be able to share Commodore peripherals…

This is obviously an opinion piece and a bit of nostalgia but, despite that, Win95 being the most important OS ever is not a claim that I make lightly. I’m a student of this space and there are many great contenders but, in my opinion, none had as dramatic an effect on the entire industry, and certainly none as quickly as Win95.

So, what am I talking about? Let’s set some context:

1. In 1995, PCs outnumbered all other computers at roughly 80M units, growing to roughly 90M by 1998. I think a case can be made that this out numbers…

So the usual caveats apply: In the interest of brevity, what I’m going to write is only approximately correct, so do take this all with a grain of salt.

So here I’m talking about Fail-fast in the context of coding, not experimentation. This is the idea that there are many cases where your program should just abort rather than trying to recover. Classic examples of this sort of thing include “exit() or abort() on out of memory” or “out of disk space”. That sort of thing.

People are often surprised by this approach, having been trained to (e.g.) guard every…

I wrote this because my friend Laura did some tweets on “SCM” [Source Control Manager, “scum”] and it turned into a little bit of history of the late 80s and early/mid 90s.

Near as I can tell SCM went nowhere. I learned what I did about it from a series of demos that we were given back when I worked in languages at MS. It was totally unlike SLM (“Slime”, or for SLM 1.5, “Slime and a half”). Let me say a few things about SLM first.

• SLM works with just files, so you can stand up a repo in…

I’ve heard people say things like they want to create a “performance first” organization but frankly I think starting from those words is already wrong. There are many success factors in software systems, performance is one of them, but you can’t win by prioritizing just performance — you need all the other factors to be there as well. One of my favorite quips is “It’s easy to make it fast if it doesn’t have to work” which is my goofy way of saying “Dude, clearly just perf isn’t enough” or “You don’t get points for speed if it sucks” or…