Technology

This month’s influential articles dive into discriminatory behavior along two different axes.

All Things Open is a conference dedicated to open source tech and practices. Although ostensibly focused on tech in the enterprise, many of the talks applied to non-enterprise audiences as well. It’s a multi-multi-multi-track conference, with 4000+ attendees, held in Raleigh, NC. I hadn’t attended before, and since I live so close now, I decided to go! I’m all for the hallway track, but I was determined to make it to at least some sessions each day....

2-Factor Authentication (2FA) or Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) are ways of securing accounts above and beyond normal password protection. Typically, we think of 2FA as something you know (your password) and something you have (a device). The idea is that if you compromise one, you still can’t get access to the protected resource. A room protected by a keypad and ID card reader is a great example of 2FA. You might be able to guess the code, but you’d also need a valid ID card to get access to the locked room....

I’ve been working on a library that includes some vector manipulations in Go, trying to follow good development practices and starting with writing my tests first. But early on, I ran into a bit of a problem: floating points. The problem Now, we know that floating points are an issue in programming, by the very nature of how they’re represented in memory. I loved Julia Evans’s brief explanation of how floats work in her Linux Comics Zine (scroll down to the sixth panel), and for a more in-depth explanation, see this piece by Carl Burch....

A couple of weeks ago, Jessica Rose posed this question to the tech crowd: What piece of advice do you wish you had been given when you entered the industry? — Jessica Rose (@jesslynnrose) August 7, 2017 It’s a great question. Previously, I had different answers depending what age range I was addressing – one for middle school students, and another one entirely for college students. While the answers I’ve given have changed throughout my career, I think I can consolidate all the different versions into this one:...

My enemy, nighttime Starting from a really early age, I had difficulties sleeping. Let’s call these difficulties insomnia on steroids. I couldn’t fall asleep, and when I did, there was no way I could stay asleep. It impaired my life so much, that I would frequently fall asleep at various points during the day out of sheer exhaustion. Words like narcolepsy were thrown around. Those sleeping pills that are supposed to be a temporary fix looked like they might become a permanent fixture....

This blog entry was actually written last week, but due to being slapped down by the flu, I haven’t been able to post it until now. Sorry! Two weeks ago, I went down to San Francisco to attend a meetup at Apigee HQ. The theme of the meetup was API Outlook for 2011, and had four great speakers to address the topic. I was lucky enough to secure an early RSVP – apparently there was a waiting list, as the event was capped at 50 attendees....