#190 – December 18, 2016
Pretty much 100% of developers working for other people end up signing some kind of “proprietary invention agreement,” but almost all of them misunderstand what’s going on with that agreement. Most developers think that the work they do at work belongs to their employer, but anything they work on at home or on their own time is theirs. This is wrong enough to be dangerous.
Exploration of HTTP security and other non-typical headers.
Dependency hell is NP-complete
Dependency hell is NP-complete. But maybe we can climb out. The package version selection problem is to find a set of dependencies that can be used to build a top-level package P that is complete (all dependencies satisfied) and compatible (no two incompatible packages are selected). There may be no such set, because of the diamond dependency problem: perhaps A needs B and C; B needs D version 1, not 2; and C needs D version 2, not 1. In this case, assuming it’s not possible to choose both versions of D, there is no way to build A.
I built a computer from scratch
Ever since I started programming, I have been interested in how the stack works all the way down to the bottom. Although I don’t know the specifics on a lot of things, I like to think I have developed a reasonably complete understanding of how a modern computer works all the way down to the assembly level. The levels below that have always been more or less shrouded in a thick fog of mystery for me. A couple of months ago I decided to do something about that, and what better way to learn something new then to jump straight into the deep end. I decided to design and build my own computer from scratch.
Business features vs. technical features
A feature is something that your application/service does. Usually we don’t give it a lot more thought, but I recently had an interesting discussion about the exact distinctions between a business feature and a technical feature.