Never use the word “User” in your code

this week's favorite

Never use the word “User” in your code

You’re six months into a project when you realize a tiny, simple assumption you made at the start was completely wrong. And now you need to fix the problem while keeping the existing system running—with far more effort than it would’ve taken if you’d just gotten it right in the first place.

Learning from Pain

Pain is something we generally try to avoid; pain is unpleasant, but it also serves an important purpose.

How to create an OS from scratch

Inspired by this document and the OSDev wiki, I'll try to make short step-by-step READMEs and code samples for anybody to follow. Honestly, this tutorial is basically the first document but split into smaller pieces and without the theory.

Why building your own Deep Learning Computer is 10x cheaper than AWS

The machine I built costs $3k and has the parts shown below. There’s one 1080 Ti GPU to start (you can just as easily use the new 2080 Ti for Machine Learning at $500 more — just be careful to get one with a blower fan design), a 12 Core CPU, 64GB RAM, and 1TB M.2 SSD. You can add three more GPUs easily for a total of four.

Do not fall into Oracle's Java 11 trap

For 23 years, developers have downloaded the JDK from Oracle and used it for $free. Type "JDK" into your favourite search engine, and the top link will be to an Oracle Java SE download page (I'm deliberately not providing a link). But that search and that link is now a trap.