Writing
Articles
137 articles, newest first.
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Understanding the Causes of Widespread Outages: The Cases of CrowdStrike and Microsoft
Written the day it happened. A faulty CrowdStrike update crashed Windows machines worldwide, grounding flights and taking hospitals and banks offline, the morning after a separate Azure outage. It wasn't an attack. Why…
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Akamai/Linode
Linode spent nineteen years as the developer's favorite simple cloud. Then the world's oldest CDN bought it to compete with AWS. What Linode offers, why Akamai wanted it, how its prices compare where it counts, and who…
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OPINION: Do We Really Need Another Linux Distribution?
There are hundreds of Linux distributions, and someone is starting another one right now. Do we need it? Probably not. Should they do it anyway? Probably yes. What all that choice really costs, what it's given us, and…
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The Broad Expertise of Linux Engineers
Linux engineering roles tend to span more layers than the equivalent Windows roles. That isn't because Linux people are smarter. It's because of where Linux runs and how open systems are put together. Why the job is so…
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Understanding Blockchain
Strip away the coins and the hype and a blockchain is a clever answer to one hard question: how do strangers agree on a shared record when nobody's in charge? How it actually works, from hashes to consensus, what it's…
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Strangest Linux and Unix Commands and Errors
A steam train for people who mistype ls, a calendar missing eleven days, a package manager that moos, and a kernel that reports your printer is on fire. The strange corners of Linux and Unix, and the baffling error…
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A Day in the Life of a Linux Systems Engineer
Alex is made up. The day isn't. A realistic day in the life of a Linux systems engineer, from the 6 a.m. page to the evening pull request, and what each part of it says about the job that the job description leaves out.
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LF Decentralized Trust
The Linux Foundation announced last month that Hyperledger is becoming part of a bigger umbrella, LF Decentralized Trust, covering ledgers, digital identity and cryptography. What it is, what enterprise blockchain has…
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The History of Open Source
Software started out free because nobody thought to sell it. Then it became property, then a movement fought to make it free again, and then the movement won so thoroughly that the companies it fought now run on it. A…
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OPINION: A Betrayal of the Open Source Spirit
Red Hat built a billion-dollar business on other people's open source and on a promise that anyone could rebuild what it sold. Then it ended CentOS and put RHEL's source behind a subscription agreement. Two weeks after…
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Understanding the Leading CDNs
A content delivery network makes your site faster and harder to knock over, and puts a third party in the middle of every request. How CDNs work, how Cloudflare, Akamai, CloudFront, Fastly, Imperva and Sucuri differ…
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How Apple Leveraged Open Source Technology to Build macOS
Underneath the Mac is a Unix built from Mach, BSD and decades of open source, and Apple has given some of it back and walked away from some of it. How macOS got its foundations, what Apple contributed, and why the bash…