Writing

  • A Few Notable Recent Stories

    • An Effort to Secure the Network Time Protocol NTS is an extension of NTP that includes a TLS key exchange, using the same key exchange infrastructure used for secure web browsing. (Linux Weekly News), 2026-02-25.

    What Microsoft Learned Building an MCP Server Despite their similarities, an MCP Server is not an API Gateway, Microsoft engineers advise. It can do so much more, so let it. (Techstrong IT), 2026-02-23.

    Cost Control for Kubernetes: Inform, Right-Size, Govern Despite their similarities, an MCP Server is not an API Gateway, Microsoft engineers advise. It can do so much more, so let it. (Techstrong IT), 2026-02-23.

    Cost Control for Kubernetes: Inform, Right-Size, Govern As Kubernetes moves from testbeds to production, managers are getting sticker shock from the bills a K8s deployment can incur. (Cloud Native Now), 2026-02-20.

    Open source registries do not have enough money to implement basic security Free beer is great. Securing the keg costs money (The Register), 2026-02-16.

    Open-source mapping for disaster response (Linux Weekly News), 2026-02-13.

    Meta Spans AI Clusters Across Data Centers with BAG Meta's AI jobs are getting so large that now a single cluster can take up more capacity than an entire data center has to offer. (Techstrong IT), 2026-02-11.

    How the GNU C Compiler became the Clippy of cryptography Security devs forced to hide Boolean logic from overeager optimizer (The Register), 2026-02-11.

    Kubernetes Could Use a Different Linux Scheduler A pair of Cambridge researchers have found a way to squeeze more capacity from Kubernetes clusters, simply by making a tweak in the way the Linux kernel schedules jobs. (Cloud Native Now), 2026-02-06.

    Kubernetes and IPv6: Together at Last? This year at FOSDEM, Ole Mathias Heggem, a Norwegian DevOps consultant at Redpill Linpro, made a case that now is the time to consider using IPv6 on Kubernetes. (Cloud Native Now), 2026-02-04.

    Kubernetes Begins Work on Pod Checkpoint/Restore Kubernetes may be getting a feature that has long been enjoyed by supercomputer users: checkpoint/restore. (Cloud Native Now), 2026-02-02.

    Kubernetes telemetry feature fully compromises clusters Kubernetes nodes/proxy GET call, commonly used by monitoring tools, can be exploited to execute privileged commands and compromise entire clusters without leaving an audit trail. It is a feature, not (The New Stack), 2026-01-28.

    QCon chat: Is agentic AI killing continuous integration? Continuous integration, as we know it now, can not survive in the age of AI-driven code development, QCON AI speakers have testified. (The New Stack), 2026-01-27.

    Cisco is using eBPF to rethink firewalls, vulnerability mitigation Cisco is integrating eBPF directly into its enterprise hardware and smart software to provide kernel-level security. (The New Stack), 2026-01-26.

    Visual inspection finds the stories hidden in your charts In this ACM Tech Talk, researcher Angelica Lo Duca explains how data peaks, gradients and thresholds can reveal meaningful narratives. (The New Stack), 2026-01-25.

    Bryan Cantrill: How Kubernetes Broke the AWS Cloud Monopoly By introducing a vendor-neutral orchestration layer, Kubernetes shattered the API lock-in that once made AWS market dominance appear insurmountable. (The New Stack), 2026-01-06.

    Kepler: The OpenAI Internal Agent Platform for Synthesizing Data OpenAI developed Kepler, an internal AI agent powered by GPT-5, to help employees navigate and query over 70,000 complex datasets. (The New Stack), 2026-01-05.

    Martin Fowler on Preparing for Nondeterministic Computing Just as mechanical engineers use tolerances to determine how safe a material is, so too will AI need to come with a set of acceptable guidelines. (The New Stack), 2025-12-28.

    Apple UX Pioneer on Reviving Computer Desktop Design Desktop UX has not meaningfully changed in 20 years, Scott Jenson said at the Ubuntu Summit. He encouraged users to look for new ways to move data and handle things. (The New Stack), 2025-12-21.

    CSS Layout: How To Center a Div the Old School Way After the center tag was deprecated in HTML 4.0 for architectural purity, centering content became complex and difficult. Here is how a whole generation of web developers did it before Grid or Flexbox (The New Stack), 2025-12-16.

    Kubernetes: Get the Most from Dynamic Resource Allocation DRA allows the scheduler to understand specific device attributes, setting the stage for locality-aware scheduling to minimize data latency. (The New Stack), 2025-12-13.

    IBM HashiCorp Sunsets Terraform External Language Support This decision forces Terraform users to migrate to HCL, drawing criticism from those who point to CDK popularity as proof Terraform still needs advanced programming capabilities. (The New Stack), 2025-12-12.

    IBM Confluent Acquisition Is About Event-Driven AI Driven by the insatiable data hunger of GenAI, IBM is buying Kafka streaming powerhouse Confluent to help the enterprise seize control of its scattered, chaotic data ecosystem. (The New Stack), 2025-12-11.

    Ignore Prior Instructions: AI Still Befuddled by Basic Reasoning Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich warns users to know the limits of what LLMs can do, and what they never do. An ACM talk. (The New Stack), 2025-12-07.

    How Amazon Prepares for Black Friday: Predictive Modeling Black Friday is coming up. At KubeCon, two Amazon engineers shared secrets of how they ensure the shopping service stays up even under heavy duress. (The New Stack), 2025-11-28.

    Spacelift Scales Legacy Automation: Terraform First, Ansible Next Spacelift Scales Legacy Automation: Terraform First, Ansible Next (The New Stack), 2025-11-24.

    CNCF Retires the Ingress Nginx Controller for Kubernetes The Ingress Nginx controller — the default entry point for Kubernetes — is being retired in March 2026, forcing a surprised community to upgrade to the Gateway API. (The New Stack), 2025-11-21.

    OpenAI Recovers 30,000 CPU Cores With Fluent Bit Tweak By profiling the system and disabling a single unnecessary function, the AI giant recovered over 35% of its CPU cycles. A report from Kubecon. (The New Stack), 2025-11-13.

    KubeCon: A Terraform Killer Built on Apple Pkl Formae, from Platform Engineering Labs, addresses the brittleness of Day 2 operations by using Apple Pkl configuration language. (The New Stack), 2025-11-12.

    Moving From C++ to Rust? ClickHouse Has Some Advice Facing the monumental challenge of maintaining a massive, security-vulnerable C++ codebase, the core ClickHouse team embarked on an incremental migration to Rust. Here is what they learned. (The New Stack), 2025-11-05.

    Apache Arrow's New Goal to Replace Outdated Database Drivers A new startup, Columnar, looks to streamline the copying of tabular data across systems, using Apache Arrow and the ADBC API. (The New Stack), 2025-11-03.

    CSS Finally Gets Inline Conditional Logic With New if Function Powerful inline conditional logic comes to stylesheets for the first time. Here is how it works and what it means for developers. (The New Stack), 2025-10-17.

    Broadcom Ends Free Bitnami Images, Forcing Users to Find Alternatives Broadcom has ended its free Bitnami ended its free Bitnami image program, forcing users of Helm and other open source projects to find new free image sources to avoid deployment disruptions. (The New Stack), 2025-09-30.

    Why You Can Not Debug a Running Quantum Computer Program Debugging a running quantum program is impossible due to cost, noise, and the nature of quantum states. (The New Stack), 2025-09-13.

    Research: eBPF Can Actually Slow Your Applications Contrary to popular belief, eBPF does not always hasten performance. Sometimes it can actually slow an application -- and slow its neighbors too. (The New Stack), 2025-09-12.

    What the EU Cyber Resilience Act Means for Open Source Open source is about to collide with product liability in a major way. (The New Stack), 2025-08-21.

    Python Exposes Phantom Dependencies With SBOM Screening PEP 770 provides a directory to document all of a Python dependencies, not just those written in Python. (The New Stack), 2025-08-13.

    Kubernetes Will Solve YAML Headaches with KYAML The new KYAML subset just for K8s relieves the need to count white spaces and solves the age-old Norway issue. (The New Stack), 2025-08-07.

    6 Design Principles for Edge Computing Systems From limited resources to unique requirements, edge systems have a number of characteristics that those designing them should keep in mind. (The New Stack), 2025-07-17.

    FoundationDB is A Distributed Database That Can Not Be Killed Even when dismembered by multiple failures, FoundationDB remains undaunted, relentlessly restoring itself to keep data flowing. (The New Stack), 2025-07-15.

    Google Brings the Lustre Parallel File System to Its Cloud The high-performance computing file system could find a second AI users hungry for tebibytes of fast data. (The New Stack), 2025-07-11.

    DoorDash Fashions Snowflake Into Real-Time Financial Reporting System DoorDash has significantly accelerated data access for business analysts and enabled near-instantaneous auditing, reducing manual processes and improving decision-making. (The New Stack), 2025-07-10.

    Kraft Trims Snowflake Bill with AI App to Fine-Tune Queries The food giant has developed an app with Infosys that can monitor for sub-optimal data warehouse deployments and mis-tuned queries. (The New Stack), 2025-07-08.

    Linux Kernel Maintainers Get Some Help from AI Like any other novice engineer intern, LLMs have been put to work in the Linux kernel core development community doing the drudgery no one else has time to do. (The New Stack), 2025-07-04.

    What is New in Apache Iceberg 3.0 Apache Iceberg has expanded and is ready to support a greater variance of big data-based workloads. (The New Stack), 2025-06-19.

    Infrastructure From Code: What Went Wrong Developers were reluctant to give up control and vendors struggled to meet diverse compliance and operational needs. Now, the focus is shifting. (The New Stack), 2025-06-13.

    OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: AI Is Now Ready for the Enterprise Sam Altman now advises enterprise leaders to just do it when it comes to adopting AI, a significant shift from his more cautious stance a year ago. (The New Stack), 2025-06-03.

    Python Pandas Ditches NumPy for Speedier PyArrow Pandas 3.0 will significantly boost performance by replacing NumPy with PyArrow as its default engine, enabling faster loading and reading of columnar data. (The New Stack), 2025-05-27.

    Cloud Service: What Pope Francis Thought About AI Pope Francis had some well-considered views about the differences between artificial intelligence and the real thing. They could be useful in thinking about AI going forward. (The New Stack), 2025-04-21.

    MongoDB Finds AI Can Help With Legacy System Migration MongoDB says that with these tools, companies can save money, run things more efficiently and make better architectural decisions. (The New Stack), 2025-04-17.

    Q&A: How Google Itself Uses Its Gemini Large Language Model Paige Bailey shares how Google uses its Gemini AI model in its SDLC to speed coding, documentation, project planning and mor (The New Stack), 2025-04-15.

    How To Generate AI From a Database: Bruce Momjian At FOSDEM 2025, EDB PostgreSQL chief expert Bruce Momjian walked the audience through the steps for turning data into AI. (The New Stack), 2025-03-28.

    How Canva Keeps Its Image Metadata Fresh With trendy new terms constantly entering the lexicon, Canva built an interactive data labeling pipeline to assure its collection of 40 billion stock images stays up to date. (The New Stack), 2025-03-21.

    How Slack Transformed Cron into a Distributed Job Scheduler With help from Kubernetes, Golang and Kafka, Slack crontab drives 2,000 tasks an hour. (The New Stack), 2025-03-14.

    MCP Bridges LLMs to the Apps They Need MCP may look like an extra layer on top of APIs. But Anthropic engineers have a larger vision to make MCP the universal method for AI agents to trigger external actions. (The New Stack), 2025-03-07.

    FerretDB 2.0: Open Source MongoDB With PostgreSQL Power FerretDB, an open-source MongoDB proxy on PostgreSQL, launches v2.0 with speed upgrades and vendor-neutral NoSQL standard. (The New Stack), 2025-03-05.

    PostgreSQL Operator Joins CNCF Sandbox Stage CloudNativePG, a Kubernetes operator for PostgreSQL, has been accepted into the CNCF sandbox, simplifying database management within Kubernetes environments by automating high availability and failove (The New Stack), 2025-02-26.

    Save Valuable GenAI Tokens With This One Simple Trick LLMs are great at text but lousy (and expensive) at business analytics. (The New Stack), 2025-02-24.

    Spegel: A Stateless Cache for Locally Storing Image Artifacts Bypass the latest Docker Hub rate limits with this stateless image cache. (The New Stack), 2025-02-21.

    Object Store Apps: Cloud Native Architecture The object store, once a somewhat niche technology, is now becoming a fundamental building block of the modern cloud. (The New Stack), 2025-02-14.

    Netkit to Network a Million Containers for ByteDance Built on eBPF, netkit offers a swifter alternative to Virtual Ethernet for container networking, ByteDance engineers have concluded. (The New Stack), 2025-01-29.

    ICYMI: DeepSeek Is an Open Source Success Story Turns out you may not need data centers of specialized hardware to build large AI models, just some good old-fashioned engineering and an open source license. Meta and Nvidia are freaking out. (The New Stack), 2025-01-28.

    What Makes TikTok So Effective TikTok recommendations can be incredibly good at understanding what users want — so good that it is the envy of tech titans like Elon Musk. But what makes TikTok tick? (The New Stack), 2025-01-24.

    Vector Search: Understand This New Revolution in AI Three presenters from ATO 2024 show how vector processing is changing how our systems interact with information. (The New Stack), 2025-01-14.

    Reddit No Longer Haunted by Drifting Kubernetes Configurations Three years ago, Reddit infra engineers spent most of their time putting out fires. Developing a platform abstraction streamlined operations and put them back in charge. (The New Stack), 2025-01-08.

    Infrastructure as Code in 2024: Why It Is Still So Terrible Tool fragmentation, integration hassles, configuration nightmares: Users of IaC tools are fed up. (The New Stack), 2024-12-26.

    Year in Review: Containers Get Smaller, Faster, More Secure Containers were a revolutionary jump ahead of virtual machines, and they continue to get faster, lighter and more secure in the years since. (The New Stack), 2024-12-19.

    Kubernetes 1.35 Timbernetes Introduces Vertical Scaling Kubernetes 1.35 “Timbernetes” Introduces Vertical Scaling (The New Stack), 2025-12-17.

    Kamera Uses Simulation To Verify Kubernetes Controller Logic The new tool from a UC Santa Cruz grad student uses simulation and model checking to comprehensively verify controller logic on a laptop. (The New Stack), 2025-11-25.

    With WarpStream, Confluent Got a New Type of Kafka Platform WarpStream customers ran Kafka at a tenth of the cost of other cloud providers, thanks to using AWS object storage to beat networking costs. (The New Stack), 2024-10-01.

    What GitHub Learned Building Copilot In an ACM tech talk, a principal researcher for the GitHub R&D arm shares the lessons learned developing a generative AI-enhanced app for coders. (The New Stack), 2024-10-04.

    eBPF Is Coming for Windows With the help of the IETF and Microsoft, eBPF will soon offer cross-platform compatibility for in-kernel programs, for both Linux and Windows. (The New Stack), 2024-10-11.

    PostgreSQL 17 Gets Incremental Backup, SQL Queries for JSON EDB's VP of database development, Tom Kincaid, reveals his favorite features of the newly released PostgreSQL 17. (The New Stack), 2024-09-26.

    Beyond Infrastructure as Code: System Initiative Goes Live System Initiative brings Digital Twins-styled modeling to platform automation, allowing teams to visually test new configurations on the fly. (The New Stack), 2024-09-25.

    Free JavaScript from Legal Clutches of Oracle, Devs Petition Despite its minimal involvement in the language, Oracle still owns the JavaScript trademark. Ryan Dahl and other JS stewards are asking the company to relinquish the name to the public domain. (The New Stack), 2024-09-17.

    VMware Users Adjust to Broadcom Subscription Licensing At VMware Explore last month, customers expressed unease at the new subscription model but remained hopeful that they could make it work. (The New Stack), 2024-09-11.

    Charles Schwab Adopts PostgreSQL (With VMware Tanzu) One of the benefits of being a Charles Schwab analyst is that you can pull up a new PostgreSQL database at a click of a button. (The New Stack), 2024-09-04.

    Istio 1.23 Drops the Sidecar for a Simpler Ambient Mesh This new edition of the Istio service mesh can be run without sidecars, simplifying deployments and, in some cases, even reducing latency. (The New Stack), 2024-08-24.

    Meta Open Sources DCPerf, a Benchmark for Hyperscale Workloads With five tests, the social media giant expands beyond standard SPEC benchmarking to more accurately predict workload performance. (The New Stack), 2024-08-15.

    NIST Releases Encryption to Guard Against Quantum Computing Attacks Though quantum computing is still in its infancy, NIST urges IT ops teams to move to quantum-resistant encryption algorithms, providing three to get started. (The New Stack), 2024-08-14.

    Kafka 3.8 Brings Faster Startups to Java Developers The newly-released upgrade to the open source data streaming platform also gives admins more control over compression levels. (The New Stack), 2024-08-02.

    Netflix Open Sources Maestro, a Next-Gen Data Workflow Engine Maestro provides a Workflow as a Service to Netflix's data scientists and information-hungry line-of-business managers. (The New Stack), 2024-08-02.

    Debian Retools APT for Better Dependency Management DebConf/24: As dependency trees get more complicated, and provide more opportunity for security holes, a Debian engineer is revising APT to make better decisions about which packages to update. (The New Stack), 2024-07-30.

    Microsoft: Linux Is the Top Operating System on Azure Today Once, Azure was a cloud platform dedicated to Windows. These days, the company tests over 1,000 Linux distributions a month just to ensure their customer apps run smoothly on Azure. (The New Stack), 2024-07-19.

    Valkey Will Not Just Be a Redis Retread Think again if you assume the Linux Foundation's Valkey project will just be a clone of the Redis database. (The New Stack), 2024-07-17.

    Showdown at the Lakehouse: Databricks Muscles Up With Tabular By acquiring Tabular, Databricks can combine Apache Iceberg expertise with its own Delta Lake format, and promises to unify the increasingly fragmented market for data lakehouses. (The New Stack), 2024-07-11.

    RustLang Semantic Versioning Still Breaks Too Many Apps In an environment of automated builds, incorrectly versioned packages build can wreak havoc, one Rust dev notes on the Changelog podcast. (The New Stack), 2024-07-05.

    What GitHub Pull Requests Reveal about Your Team’s Dev Habits Does your team suffer from duplicate git Issues? How about competing or over-stuffed pull requests? A group of researchers have discovered all sorts of ways your dev team may be working with less-than (The New Stack), 2024-06-24.

    Python Mulls a Change in Version Numbering Despite popular belief, Python does not use the industry standard semantic versioning, and this has led to frustrations around backward compatibility and End-of-Life expectancies. (The New Stack), 2024-06-18.

    Why Python Is So Slow (And What Is Being Done About It) PyCon 2024 showcased a number of ways to speed the pokey Python programming language including sub-interpreters, immortal objects, just-in-time compilation and more. (The New Stack), 2024-06-14.

    PlatformCon: How Spotify Manages Infrastructure with GitOps Spotify engineer Tim Hansen described how the music service relied on GitOps principles to automate infrastructure provisioning. (The New Stack), 2024-06-12.

    Snowflake, Databricks and the Fight for Apache Iceberg Tables The market for data lakes and data lakehouses is clearly being disrupted by open source software, given recent news from Databricks and Snowflake. (The New Stack), 2024-06-10.

    DuckDB: In-Process Python Analytics for Not-Quite-Big Data An in-process analytics database, DuckDB can work with surprisingly large data sets without having to maintain a distributed multiserver system. Best of all? You can analyze data directly from your Py (The New Stack), 2024-05-31.

    PyCon US: Simon Willison on Hacking LLMs for Fun and Profit Prompt engineering is a big bag of dumb tricks, argued the co-creator of Django. But that is no reason you can not create interesting apps with the technology. (The New Stack), 2024-05-19.

    Red Hat Rethinks the Linux Distro for the Container Age Red Hat wants to bring cloud native-based build and deployment practices to the Linux operating system itself. (The New Stack), 2024-05-07.

    5 Lessons From LinkedIn’s First Foray Into GenAI Development LinkedIn has found that prototyping a Generative AI-based feature can be done really quickly. Getting it into production, however, is another matter entirely. (The New Stack), 2024-05-02.

    GQL: A New ISO Standard for Querying Graph Databases The International Standard for Organization (ISO) has a published an international standard for querying graphs, called the Graph Query Language (ISO/IEC 39075:2024). (The New Stack), 2024-04-29.

    Guider Daemon Automates Linux Performance Monitoring Guider, built over a period of nine years, comes with over 150 performance-tracking and visualization command-line tools. (The New Stack), 2024-04-19.

    Golang 1.22 Redefines the For Loop for Easier Concurrency Golang 1.22 fixes a quirk in the for loop that has long-thwarted closure users. (The New Stack), 2024-04-04.

    Linux xz Backdoor Damage Could Be Greater Than Feared A mysterious contributor who planted the backdoor helped maintain the widely used xz compression library for the past two years. So what else was hidden in there? (The New Stack), 2024-03-31.

    Chainguard: Outdated Containers Accumulate Vulnerabilities Hackers keep finding vulnerabilities in software even after the application is no longer supported, Chainguard has found. (The New Stack), 2024-03-29.

    20 Years in the Making, GnuCOBOL Is Ready for Industry GnuCOBOL has reached an industrial maturity and can compete with proprietary offers in all environments. (The New Stack), 2024-03-15.

    Meet DBOS: A Database Alternative to Kubernetes The creator of PostgreSQL has teamed with the creator of Apache Spark to build a cloud OS on top of a distributed database. (The New Stack), 2024-03-12.

    With YAMLScript, YAML Becomes a Proper Programming Language A scripting language that brings to YAML all the programming capabilities many assumed it already had. (The New Stack), 2024-03-11.

    Vendoring: Why You Still Have Overlooked Security Holes A cautionary FOSDEM talk from the Nix community about all the vulnerable software that may still overlooked on your systems. (The New Stack), 2024-03-08.

    Can the Unix Shell Be Improved? Hell Yes! A look inside the world of alternative command line environments. (The New Stack), 2024-03-02.

    Google Spends $1 Million to Make Rust, C++ Interoperable Eager to eliminate memory errors in C++-based Android apps, Google wants to make it easy for devs to write functionality in Rust instead. (The New Stack), 2024-02-05.

    The Problem with Slow Rustlang Build Times Frustrated by the slow build times of their Rust programs, the engineering team at Oxide investigated the entire compile process. (The New Stack), 2024-01-25.

  • Older Stories

    • The Day Vehicles Started Driving Themselves

    Fri, 19 Mar 2004

    Behind Remember, if you will, that not all that long ago the very idea of a self-navigating vehicle was mostly the stuff of SciFi. It certainly seemed fairly preposterous in 2004, when I had the opportunity to witness the first-ever autonomous vehicle race, held in the Mojave Desert, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA). So it was remarkable then that the winning vehicle had managed to travel was 7.4 miles on its own, just as it is remarkable today how quickly these robot vehicles have evolved since then. Here is my account of that day. Click to Read More...

    The Long Running Feud Between vi and EMACS users

    Tue, 04 Dec 2001

    EMACS Like fight-fatigued battalions who come to a temporary truce but refuse to give up the war, vi and EMACS users keep an uneasy standoff in many Linux communities. When pressed, most people familiar with both editors will say the difference between the two is primarily one of speed vs. flexibility. But why has this difference of views remained a divisor of programmer culture for more than four decades now? Click to Read More...


    Pie in the Sky: How Crack the Sky Became Famous in Nowhere but Baltimore

    Wed, 12 Jul 1995

    A 1975 was the Indian summer of progressive rock. Procol Harum and King Crimson released their respective swan songs. ELP, Yes, Pink Floyd and Genesis were still popular. Younger art rock upstarts like Kansas, 10CC, Supertramp, and Gentle Giant were weighing in with strong new releases. Crack the Sky, from a small steel town 30 minutes west of Pittsburgh, was then one of most promising of these young upshots. Click to Read More...

  • Feature writing about life in Baltimore: Baltimore City Paper, Baltimore Magazine
  • Bushwick Nation: (Editor, Web Admin) Pop culture blog about life in Bushwick
  • Spock Science Monitor: (Editor, 2006-2008) Burning Man's longest-running (mock) newspaper

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