You can write bad code in any language. But at least with Whitespace you won’t have to look at it.

It seems that ChatGPT has learned to wind down for the year.

GitHub migrated their entire database fleet with zero downtime. The secret: lots of time testing and careful work.

Between testing, performance tuning, and resolving identified issues, the overall upgrade process took over a year and involved engineers from multiple teams at GitHub. We upgraded our entire fleet to MySQL 8.0 – including staging clusters, production clusters in support of GitHub.com, and instances in support of internal tools. This upgrade highlighted the importance of our observability platform, testing plan, and rollback capabilities. The testing and gradual rollout strategy allowed us to identify problems early and reduce the likelihood for encountering new failure modes for the primary upgrade.

Youtuber Alexander the OK has produced a very nerdy deep dive into how the original version of Elite for the BBC Micro was written. It’s titled Elite - “The game that couldn’t be written and it’s just fantastic.

Chris Albon on X:

*The thing nobody talks about with engineering management is this:

Every 3-4 months every person experiences some sort of personal crisis. A family member dies, they have a bad illness, they get into an argument with another person at work, etc. etc. Sadly, that is just life. Normally after a month or so things settle down and life goes on.

But when you are managing 6+ people it means there is always a crisis you are helping someone work through. You are always carrying a bit of emotional burden or worry around with you.*

(via Simon Willison)

Cert NZ’s Cyber Smart concentrated on awareness of online scams. It’s worth sharing this site with friends and family.

Is it actually worth it to run uphill?

Fancy an hour long walk down memory lane with Rob Pike, discussing his experience programming in the 70s, working on UNIX at Bell Labs, and developing, among other things, the first windowing system? Of course you do.