UUIDs are great for identifying users, requests, transactions, tenants etc etc. They are unlikely to collide, their predictable format reduces cognitive load, rules on their content avoid compatibility issues (ever try putting random strings into URLs and hoping for the best?), their ubiquity means you don’t have to explain them…

This was something that appeared quite mysterious and occasional at first, but seems to have a very simple explanation in the end. (This is a software engineering story.) I had a REST API that very occasionally returned results to the wrong user. Logging confirmed that this never happened inside my…

As the climate heats, climate scientists predict that the effects will not be smoothly spread out over time nor space. It will be lumpy. Some times and some places will see particularly increased temperatures. Apparently, Western Europe is predicted to especially get heatwaves: more than other comparable parts of the northern hemisphere. Temporarily sweltering in unusually high temperatures during the northern summer is going to be usual.

I’m inspired by the way the creators in this podcast story worked at a seemingly insurmountable problem step by step until it became doable. Want to transport cargo but avoid burning fuel → powered by sail. Sail is more expensive to operate → transport only high value goods, add sustainability angle to marketing. Principles say to consume locally where possible → transport goods that can’t be sourced locally.

Apparently multitasking not only makes you temporarily worse at thinking while you’re doing it but also, just in case you were thinking about building up a multitasking skill, worse at multitasking in the future. It might even lead to physical brain changes, which sounds a little scary. I can confirm that when I’m forced to multitask I subjectively experience my thinking as slower and shallower. Multitasking Reduces Your Intelligence By 17 Percent Perhaps the most obvious characteristic of open-plan offices is that they're designed so that employees must multitask…www.inc.com

If you were to hold a lump of dark matter in your hand you’d be able to feel the weight but not see it. How weird.

Kotlin’s smart casts continue to weird me out, in a good way. It’s a reminder that the compiler doesn’t actually produce code that does what I can see on my screen, but rather what it chose to write into bytecode based on looking at my code and then deciding for itself. I can write a line of code that by itself is syntactically wrong and yet because of the lines around it they together become right.

This morning I woke to the happy news that a vulnerable family who have been subjected to performative cruelty by Australia’s now-former government ministers and the continuing immigration detention system have been allowed to return home to Biloela. This town petitioned strongly to get them back over years. In a…

“Ready mode” is better than “crazy mode”. Stop saying “crazy busy” and get into ready mode instead. There’s no way almost any of us are as busy as an ER doctor, so listen to the advice below from someone who faces emergencies. Relentlessly triage. Only top priorities get attention right…