So, I Moved to Denmark
November 9, 2025
As the title says, we moved to Aarhus1 Denmark. It’s the second biggest city in Denmark, and located on Jutland, the part of Denmark that’s connected to continental Europe. We moved about a month ago, and I’ve taken up a job managing a few teams at Uber. I’ll have more to write about my job later, once I have a better grasp on what’s going on. As you can imagine the typical response to saying “I’m moving to Aarhus, Denmark2” was some combination of “What?” and “Where?” Given that we’d never been to Denmark before moving there, it was a kind of insane thing to do. We’re still wrapping our heads around the fact that we live here, and that this is not just a very long vacation3. …
So, you don't like a web platform proposal, a response
July 23, 2023
Introduction I regret to inform you that I am once again, mad on the internet. There is a new Chromium proposal that’s officially designed to cut out click fraud on the web by allowing the server to automatically inspect and validate the hardware, OS, and browser state of the client. Given Chrome’s market dominance, it’s expected that this feature would rapidly become an industry norm if released. The community freaked out. A lot of people had concerns about how this capability might be eventually abused to restrict competitive browsers and tools used to block ads. To the authors’ credit they did include a section about risks, but the technical details were too light to be persuasive in my opinion1. Eventually Yoav, a high level Chromium contributor, stepped in to do crisis comms and it did not go well. As of this writing the repo is locked, always a sign things have gone from bad to worse2. …
Telemetry and Trust
February 25, 2023
I recently read an article about Go opt in tracking being a mistake. The author was very earnest about the pros of compiler tool chain telemetry, how it was very common among Google and Go’s competitors, and how opt in tracking would skew the data set. Their general argument was that anonymized telemetry is extremely useful for compiler writers, and that shifting Go to opt in rather than opt out doesn’t help user safety and reduces the ability of the Go team to correctly steer their important project …
Lets Talk About Trains
October 17, 2022
Last week1 Casey had a blog about High Speed Rail (HSR), and it triggered my worst impulse: my need to argue on the Internet. Casey suggested that I write my own post rather than just being cranky in his comments, and while my initial instinct was to continue to be cranky, I must admit that he was right and I should be more contstructive. The starting point for all of this discussion is the continued boondoggle of trying to create a HSR between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Just to get this out of the way up front, there is no way in hell I would ever consider defending how this project is being implemented. I think HSR has a lot of opportunity in America, but the CA project is spending way too much2 for way too little compared to our peers. America needs to have a real serious “come to jesus” moment about why it’s so damned expensive to build important public goods. But how to fix that is beyond my capability. …
Parler, AWS, and the ACLU
January 12, 2021
Parler, AWS, and the ACLU Parler was recently kicked off AWS, and as of this writing is currently offline. I would be fairly surprised if we see it come back online anytime soon. I was only mildly surprised to see the ACLU step in to make arguments on Parler’s behalf, but not that surprised. Free Speech law and general advocacy almost universally involves defending speech that is either unpopular or said by repulsive people; popular speech is rarely first up to be banned. Usually suppressing unpopular speech is the first step to more general suppression, which is why groups like the ACLU often end up defending the speech of unpleasant people. …
Two Open Source Models
April 10, 2020
Two Open Source Models I have repeatedly seen clashes between users and maintainers of open source projects over who “owes” whom what, and I believe that these clashes come from a difference in mental models that are not explicitly stated. These clashes result in hurt feelings and the occasional accusation of entitlement or elitism, exacerbating the problem. The heart of this disagreement can be simplified as such: are open source maintainers giving a free gift to the community, or are they fulfilling a role that comes with privileges and expectations? Neither model is completely correct, but problematically maintainers and users tend to adhere to different models, causing conflict. …
False Novelty
December 19, 2018
Introduction The internet is starting to worry me. This is a problem for me. I make my money on the internet, and I also spend a lot of time on it for entertainment. Beginning to worry about the internet is a bit like looking at your pet kitten and realizing that those tiger stripes are real and not merely an adorable coloration. It’s a slow growing fear that you might be living with something much more dangerous than you thought. …
No You Probably Don't Need a Blockchain
February 21, 2018
On Bitcoins and Blockchains Oh Bitcoin, the darling of everyone’s economic dreams. Some think it’ll destroy the fed, others hope it’ll kill off the big banks. Some just think it’s going to make them rich, others go as far as hoping it’ll kill off governments completely. Whatever you happen to hate, Bitcoin is coming to destroy it! All of this is complete nonsense, of course. There are enough mutually exclusive dreams about Bitcoin that it’s clear that not all of them can come true, possibly even the hopes of easy riches given its unpredictable volatility. …
MDC and Threadpools
September 1, 2017
Well written web services must have clear and easy to follow logs. Without good logs a programmer will be unable to diagnose or reproduce problems that might arise. And while many systems will keep logs in their reverse proxy like Nginx, a well written system will also have application/domain specific logs written within the application itself. A common goal of application logs is to tie a given log line to a specific request. Because modern servers are multi-threaded, it is possible for multiple requests to be serviced at the same time, resulting in log messages from different requests being intermingled in the log output. …
Java Without If
January 26, 2017
Over the past year my team has been doing something shocking to a lot of engineers: we’re favoring pure Java over Clojure. We aren’t rewriting all our Clojure code, but we definitely prefer Java for green field projects. This post is not going to be a compare and contrast between the two, nor am I going to bash Clojure. Language compare and contrast posts always descend into flame wars, and it’s very easy to confuse the result of hard lessons learned with the benefits of a new language. …