My personal productivity cycle is tied to this industry hype cycle. My schoolfriend back in 2003 was my personal “technology trigger.” From him, I rapidly learned some standard tools from Gartner’s plateau of productivity: PHP, MySQL, Apache. Then I surveyed the plateau more widely, finding Python, Postgres, and Nginx. A little further away, I had heard of Gartner’s trough of disillusionment. I sneered at the Perl, Java, CORBA. I’ll keep my Python, thanks. — The hacker hype cycle

The full text of my Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages book (second printing, 1991) is now available.

♪ The Dresden Dolls · Coin-Operated Boy

Alternatives to bloatware.

♪ Nadje Noordhuis · Migration

The relationship between developers and App Store reviewers is tense at best. Most people are trying to build well-designed, useful mobile apps. Apple has instituted App Store reviews to maintain a high-quality bar for apps and weed out spammy or nefarious actors, using human evaluators to test individual apps and provide direct feedback. However, malicious apps are relatively rare; arguably, Apple doesn’t do a great job filtering them out anyway. — Outdated vs. Complete

Explained from scratch: private information retrieval using homomorphic encryption.

Data types à la carte. #haskell

Types at the edges in Python. #python

TIL about Rclone, thanks to the following blog post: An Upside-Down Backup Strategy.