Forget revenue or innovation or how well they spy on you. The only real way to measure a company is by having their CEOs punch it out. Fight club rules, MMA restrictions, round-robin tournament. Let’s do this. 5. Larry Page Coming fifth is Page. Page, while a damn good software dude, would be…

I’m turning 26 next week, which means I’ve completely matured as a human being. If I could go back in time and talk to the adolescent Hillel, here’s what I would want to tell him. Get your wisdom teeth out now. “If you don’t do them now they’ll get infected…

You’ve probably read a dozen clear, well-reasoned arguments about why mutability in your code is bad. This is not one of them. Instead, I wrote an unclear, shoddy argument for why it’s bad. Mutability is bad. To understand why, we have to talk about time. Talking about time With any system we build…

How do we harden a system against race conditions? When it uses a complex cache? When it requires a global state? We could blanket our system in tests, hope we’ve covered every possible edge case, and pray that nothing new happens in production. Or we could use formal methods. We…

Kill everyone else

The job market for Python programmers has never been brighter. The US Bureau of Labour Statistics estimates that 100 new Python jobs are created each second and, by 2025, there will be more job openings than people who have ever lived. With such a high demand it’s not surprising that…

When trying to explain why Vim is so amazing, people often say things like “you don’t have to use the mouse” and “modal editing” and “commands are composable” and such. These are all pretty nice things that make coding faster and easier. …

“Python or Ruby” is the one of the most hotly debated topics in the programming world, ranking just behind “emacs or vim” and “pro-skub or anti-skub” in importance and complexity. …