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Writing about technology since 2015. System architecture, AI, data engineering, cloud, and everything in between. Search, filter by year, or browse by topic.
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Showing 145 of 145 articles
The IPL Secret Nobody Talks About… It’s Not Just Cricket Anymore
Millions watch IPL for entertainment. But behind every ball, something far more powerful is shaping the future of decision-making.
The Tariff Shock Is Here. What Does It Actually Mean for Tech?
Tech stocks are in freefall. Supply chains are being repriced overnight. Everyone is talking about tariffs. But underneath the noise, there are some quieter questions worth sitting with.
Everyone Is Building AI Agents. But Is Anyone Actually Using Them?
AI agents are the most talked-about thing in tech right now. Every company is announcing one. But when I look at what people are actually doing with them day to day, the picture is much quieter than the announcements suggest.
The End of IT Dependency: How AI Is Turning Everyone Into a Builder
Ten years ago, businesses called an IT vendor when something needed building. Today, an individual with a laptop and an AI tool can do what an entire outsourcing team once could. The dependency chain is collapsing. Most people have not noticed yet.
The Claude Leak of 2026: A Post-Mortem on AI Secrecy and the Dawn of the Autonomous Wild West
The March 31st exposure of Anthropic's internal architecture is not merely a corporate data breach. It is the definitive collapse of the "Security through Obscurity" model that has governed Silicon Valley for the last decade.
I Spent a Week With Perplexity Computer. Here Is What No One Is Telling You.
Perplexity Computer launched in February 2026 at $200 a month. I used it every day for a week across research, writing, and code tasks. Here is what the reviews are not telling you.
AI in Healthcare: Not Just Hype, But Something We Need to Get Right
AI in healthcare sounds perfect on paper. Faster diagnosis, less admin, smarter systems. But when you look closer and see how hospitals actually operate day to day, things get complicated fast.
The Future of AI in Healthcare System Architecture
Healthcare AI is at an inflection point. The architecture that served hospitals for decades is colliding with AI capabilities that demand a different approach. Here is what that means in practice.
What AI Tool Should I Use as a Developer? The Honest, Unbiased Answer.
GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini. Every developer is asking the same question right now. I am not going to tell you which one to pick. I am going to help you think about it properly.
The State of AI in March 2026: An Honest Assessment
Three years after ChatGPT, the AI landscape has clarified considerably. What has worked, what has not, what the current frontier looks like, and what I think happens next.
Do You Actually Need a Certification to Work in AI? Here Is My Honest Answer.
Everyone seems to be chasing an AI certification right now. But I keep asking myself the same question: does a certificate actually prove you can do the work? My honest answer might surprise you.
The Enterprise AI Gap
AI capability has advanced rapidly. The gap between what organisations have access to and what they are successfully deploying is stubbornly wide. The reasons are not technical.
LLM Integration Patterns for Enterprise Systems
After two years of integrating language models into enterprise systems, clear patterns have emerged for what works and what causes problems. From prompt management to cost control to compliance.
What 2025 Got Right and Wrong About AI
Predictions made at the start of a year rarely survive contact with events. Reviewing what the forecasts said and what actually happened teaches more than the forecasts themselves.
Designing Resilient Distributed Systems: Lessons from Failures
I have been involved in enough production incidents to have strong opinions about what makes distributed systems resilient. The patterns are not complicated. The discipline to apply them consistently is.
Open Source AI Closes the Gap
The argument for open source AI used to be mostly about control and cost. By late 2025, capability had joined that list.
The Hidden Costs of Production AI
The cost discussion around AI applications almost always focuses on inference. Once you are at scale, inference is rarely the most important cost.
The Problem With Shipping AI Features
A team builds a prototype. The prototype is impressive. They ship it. User adoption is lower than expected. The team is confused because the prototype worked well in testing.
When Everything Became Multimodal
The models that emerged in the first half of 2025 made the text-in, text-out assumption obsolete for most practical purposes. Here is what that actually changes.
MCP: The Protocol That Made AI Agents Actually Connect to Things
Anthropic's Model Context Protocol landed in late 2024 and by 2025 had become the standard way to connect AI models to tools and data sources. Here is why it matters and how it works.
What Changed When Intelligence Got Cheap
The price of a million tokens from a frontier model dropped by roughly ninety percent over 2024. The downstream effects of that are still working through how products get built.
Reasoning Models: What o1 and DeepSeek Actually Changed
OpenAI's o1 series and DeepSeek's reasoning models demonstrated that thinking before answering produced significantly better results on hard problems. The implications for how we use LLMs are still being worked out.
RAG Is Harder Than the Diagram Makes It Look
Every introduction to retrieval-augmented generation shows the same four-step diagram. Building it in production involves considerably more decisions than four.
Agentic AI in Production: What Works in 2025
Two years after AutoGPT made agents seem imminent, the production reality is clearer. Narrow agents with human oversight work. Fully autonomous agents are still research. Here is the honest picture.
The LLM Landscape at the Start of 2025
At the start of 2024, GPT-4 was the clear benchmark. By the end of it, the picture had changed considerably. Here is what actually shifted.
Gemini 2.0 and What 2024 Actually Delivered in AI
Google released Gemini 2.0 in December 2024. The release closed a year that had delivered serious capability progress and even more serious complications.
AI and the 2024 US Election: What Actually Happened
The 2024 US election was the first national election in the era of widely available generative AI. The doomsday scenarios about AI-generated misinformation were less consequential than expected.
The Year AI Research Won the Nobel Prize
In October 2024, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for foundational work on artificial neural networks.
OpenAI o1 and the Reasoning Model Shift
In September 2024, OpenAI released o1, a model family that traded latency for reasoning capability. The capability tradeoff was different from anything previous frontier models had offered.
AI Engineering: The New Discipline Nobody Had a Name For
Something new emerged in 2024 that sat between software engineering and machine learning but was not quite either. Building reliable products on top of language models required skills and patterns that had not existed before.
The CrowdStrike Outage and the Fragility of Modern Software
A faulty update from CrowdStrike took down approximately 8.5 million Windows machines globally. The outage was not a security event. It was a software quality event with security infrastructure consequences.
Apple Intelligence and the Integration Question
At WWDC 2024, Apple announced Apple Intelligence. The pitch was about integration into existing apps rather than a standalone product. The question was whether the integration would be enough.
Running LLMs Locally in 2024: Ollama and the Democratisation of AI
Ollama made running large language models on your own machine genuinely accessible. One command to download and run Llama 3. For data-sensitive applications, this was significant.
Llama 3 and Meta’s Open Source Bet Doubles Down
Meta released Llama 3 with stronger benchmarks and the same permissive licence. The case for open source AI as a serious frontier strategy got considerably more solid.
Claude 3, Nvidia’s Rise, and the Infrastructure Behind the AI Race
In early March 2024, Anthropic released the Claude 3 model family and Nvidia briefly overtook Apple in market capitalisation. The two events were related more than coincidental.
GPT-4V and the Year Vision Came to Language Models
GPT-4 with vision capabilities arrived in late 2023 and became widely available in early 2024. Being able to show the AI a screenshot and ask questions about it changed more than I expected.
CES 2024 and the AI Hardware Moment That Did Not Quite Land
CES 2024 was full of AI hardware. The Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 generated significant attention. Whether the form factor was real, or whether it was a moment, was the question underneath.
Gemini Launches and the Year in AI Closes
In December 2023, Google launched Gemini and claimed it beat GPT-4 on multiple benchmarks. The year that ended with that launch had been the most consequential in AI history.
The Five Days That Almost Broke OpenAI
The OpenAI board fired Sam Altman on a Friday afternoon. Five days later he was back as CEO. The episode revealed more about AI governance than years of regulatory hearings had.
OpenAI DevDay and the Platform Vision
At its first developer conference, OpenAI announced GPT-4 Turbo, custom GPTs, and a vision for becoming the platform on which the next generation of applications would be built.
LLM Agents in 2023: Impressive Demos, Harder Reality
AutoGPT went viral in April 2023. Agents that could autonomously break down goals into tasks and execute them looked like the next leap. Six months later, the gap between demo and production was clear.
Mistral and the European Bet on Open AI
A French startup founded by former Meta and DeepMind researchers raised one hundred and five million euros in seed funding. Europe finally had a serious AI play.
Llama 2 and the Open Source Models That Got Serious
In mid-July 2023, Meta released Llama 2 with a licence permitting commercial use. The open source language model conversation became substantively different overnight.
Vector Databases: What They Are and Why They Suddenly Matter
Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, Qdrant: vector databases went from niche to essential infrastructure in 2023. Here is what they actually are, why they exist, and when to use one.
When One of AI’s Founders Said Something Was Wrong
In May 2023, Geoffrey Hinton left Google to speak more freely about the risks of AI. The reaction depended significantly on whose work in the field you took most seriously.
RAG: The Architecture That Made LLMs Actually Useful for Business
Retrieval Augmented Generation solved the problem that made LLMs risky for most business applications: they confidently hallucinate facts. RAG grounds responses in real documents and it changed what enterprise AI actually looked like.
GPT-4 Arrives and the Benchmark Moves Again
OpenAI released GPT-4 in March 2023, four months after ChatGPT. The capability gap with what had come before was substantial enough to reset expectations again.
Google Bard, the Demo That Cost a Hundred Billion, and the Pressure to Move Fast
Google announced Bard at a hastily scheduled event. The demo contained a factual error. The market reaction was immediate.
ChatGPT Hits a Hundred Million Users and Microsoft Bets the Farm
In late January 2023, ChatGPT reportedly crossed 100 million monthly active users. Within days, Microsoft confirmed an additional ten billion dollar investment in OpenAI.
ChatGPT Launched and Then Everything Changed
ChatGPT launched on 30 November 2022. I tried it within hours. One million users in five days. One hundred million in two months. I have been thinking about what happened ever since.
The Week ChatGPT Launched and Everything Changed
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. Within five days it had a million users. Within two months it had a hundred million.
When Musk Walked Into Twitter Carrying a Sink
On October 27, 2022, Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter and walked into the headquarters carrying a sink. The next several months would be unusual.
Stable Diffusion and What Open Source AI Actually Means
Stability AI released Stable Diffusion openly in August 2022. Within weeks it was running on consumer hardware, generating images that would have seemed impossible a year earlier. The implications were not simple.
Stable Diffusion and the Open Source AI Art Moment
In August 2022, Stable Diffusion was released as open source. The capability could now run on a personal computer with a decent GPU, and the implications spread quickly.
When the Tech Layoffs Stopped Being Surprising
By July 2022 the layoffs were happening at a pace that had stopped being newsworthy at the individual company level. The cycle had clearly turned.
The LaMDA Sentience Claim and the AI Consciousness Debate
A Google engineer claimed that LaMDA, the company’s large language model, had become sentient. The claim was almost certainly wrong. The conversation it produced was useful anyway.
Terra Luna Collapses and the Start of Crypto Winter
In a few days in May 2022, an algorithmic stablecoin called UST broke its peg and the associated token Luna lost nearly all of its value. The shockwaves rolled through the crypto industry for the rest of the year.
The Twitter Takeover Bid and What It Started
In late April 2022, Elon Musk announced an offer to buy Twitter for approximately $44 billion. The saga that followed would define social media for the rest of the year.
The NFT Crash and What It Revealed About Web3
By March 2022 the NFT market was visibly cooling. The skepticism that had been suppressed during the boom was suddenly the dominant narrative.
Starlink in Ukraine and Technology Inside an Active War
Within days of the Russian invasion, Ukrainian officials had requested Starlink terminals. The role of commercial satellite internet in active conflict became real in a way it had not been before.
CES 2022 and the Metaverse Products Nobody Was Ready For
CES 2022 was a hybrid event with reduced attendance. The pitch on the show floor was metaverse hardware. The reality was a chip shortage that did not care what you called your products.
Log4Shell and the Fragility of Open Source Dependencies
A vulnerability in a Java logging library produced one of the most consequential security incidents in years. The library was maintained by a small group of volunteers.
GitHub Copilot: Six Months of Using AI to Write Code
I got GitHub Copilot access in the technical preview in June 2021. By November I had strong opinions about what it actually was and was not. It is not a replacement for a developer. It is something different and more interesting.
Facebook Becomes Meta and the Metaverse Bet
Facebook renamed itself Meta and committed to spending tens of billions a year on the metaverse. The bet was both about the future of computing and about what to call the company that was making it.
Low-Code, No-Code, and the Question of Who Builds Software
By late 2021 the low-code and no-code conversation had reached a level of seriousness that earlier waves of similar ideas had not. The reasons were less about the tools and more about who had the time.
Web3 in 2021: Separating Signal From Noise
In 2021 it was impossible to work in technology without having a view on Web3. Here is mine, formed after actually building things with Ethereum and Solidity rather than just reading about it.
GitHub Copilot and the Start of AI-Assisted Coding
GitHub announced a technical preview of Copilot in late June 2021. The reaction from developers was unusually polarised, and unusually informative.
App Tracking Transparency and the Real Effects on Advertising
Apple’s App Tracking Transparency had been announced in 2020. By the middle of 2021, the data on what it was doing to mobile advertising was finally arriving.
When the Crypto Market Took Its First Hard Hit of 2021
Bitcoin dropped roughly half its value in a few weeks. The triggers were specific. The lesson was about how exposed the market had become to single voices.
Coinbase IPO and Crypto on Wall Street
Coinbase went public in April 2021 at a valuation that briefly exceeded $85 billion. A cryptocurrency exchange had become a Wall Street story.
The $69 Million NFT and the Question Underneath It
In March 2021, a digital artist sold an NFT at Christie’s for almost $70 million. The sale was a financial event. The interesting question was about what had actually been sold.
Clubhouse and the Audio Social Media Moment
For a few months Clubhouse was the social network everyone was trying to get into. The invite-only model created urgency. The product underneath did not last as long as the hype.
GameStop, Reddit, and the Week Finance Got Strange
A subreddit drove the price of GameStop stock up by an order of magnitude. The mechanics were a finance story. The infrastructure underneath was a technology one.
Salesforce Buying Slack and What It Said About SaaS
Salesforce announced it would acquire Slack for $27.7 billion. The deal said something about Slack and something larger about where the SaaS market was heading.
The M1 Benchmarks and Why They Were Shocking
Apple shipped the first Macs with M1 chips in November 2020. The benchmark numbers that came back were the kind that made you check your testing methodology twice.
Low-Code Platforms: Serious Tool or Expensive Toy?
Every vendor was selling low-code in 2020. Some teams I worked with used it to genuinely transform their processes. Others created unmaintainable nightmares. The difference was in how they approached it.
Nvidia, Arm, and the Battle for Chip Architecture
Nvidia announced a $40 billion deal to buy Arm from SoftBank. The chip industry, which had been quietly consolidating for years, suddenly had everyone paying attention.
TikTok and the Moment Apps Became Political
In August 2020, an executive order targeted TikTok. The questions about app ownership, data, and national borders were no longer theoretical.
GPT-3: The World Changed and Most People Were Not Looking
OpenAI released GPT-3 access to beta users in July 2020. I got access in August. The first hour with the API was unlike any other hour I had spent with a technology. Something had genuinely shifted.
Apple Silicon and the End of Intel Inside
At WWDC 2020, Apple announced it would transition the Mac line to its own ARM-based chips. The move had been rumoured for years. The execution was about to be the interesting part.
GPT-3 Arrives and Text AI Reaches a Different Level
OpenAI announced GPT-3 with a paper that quietly changed expectations of what language models could do. The API waitlist filled fast.
COVID-19 Forced Digital Transformation Nobody Had Managed to Do
Years of digital transformation strategy documents achieved less in five years than COVID-19 achieved in five weeks. Here is what that tells us about how organisations actually change.
The Month Zoom Stopped Being Just a Tool
In a few weeks, the entire knowledge economy moved into video meetings. Zoom went from a competent enterprise product to a verb. The infrastructure underneath was not ready.
When the Tech Conferences Started Cancelling
Mobile World Congress was the first major conference to cancel. The signal it sent was less about the conference and more about the months that were about to follow.
CES 2020 and the Last Big Conference Before Everything Changed
CES 2020 was full of AI demos and concept cars. Six weeks later most of the people walking those halls would be working from their kitchens.
The 2010s Are Over and Here Is What the Decade Actually Did to Us
The decade began with smartphones still being a new thing and ended with them being the primary computer for most of humanity. That single shift explains most of what the 2010s did to the world.
Disney+ Launched and the Streaming Wars Became Real
Disney+ launched on November 12th 2019, and within hours it was clear that the streaming landscape had fundamentally changed and Netflix was no longer the only service that mattered.
Google Said It Achieved Quantum Supremacy and the Debate Began Immediately
When Google published its quantum supremacy claim in Nature in October 2019, the paper had already leaked, IBM had already objected, and the argument about what the result actually meant was already underway.
The iPhone 11 Put a Neural Engine in Every Pocket
The iPhone 11 and the A13 Bionic chip were announced in September 2019, and the detail that stayed with me was not the cameras or the speed but the neural engine running eight trillion operations per second.
OpenAI Released GPT-2 and the Text It Generated Was Unsettling
When OpenAI finally released the full GPT-2 model in August 2019 after months of staged rollouts, it prompted a genuine reckoning with what capable language models actually meant.
A Five Billion Dollar Fine and Why It Felt Like Not Enough
The FTC fined Facebook five billion dollars in July 2019, the largest fine in the agency's history. The stock price went up on the day of the announcement.
Facebook Announced a Cryptocurrency and Governments Were Not Happy
When Facebook announced Libra in June 2019, the reaction from governments and central banks was immediate and visceral in a way that most tech announcements simply do not produce.
Kubernetes in Production: What Nobody Tells You
Running Kubernetes in a lab is manageable. Running it in production for a year is an education. Here are the things I wish someone had told me before we started.
5G Arrives and the Galaxy Fold Falls Apart at Launch
April 2019 was supposed to be the month foldable phones and 5G both arrived in earnest. One of them had a better debut than the other.
Apple Went All In on Services and Nothing Will Be the Same
The March 2019 Apple event was the clearest signal yet that the company had accepted its hardware growth era was maturing and was betting its next decade on subscriptions.
GPT-2 and the Day AI Writing Became Uncomfortable
OpenAI released GPT-2 in February 2019 and refused to release the full model, citing misuse concerns. I read the generated samples and understood why. Something had changed.
CES 2019 and the Foldable Phone Everyone Was Talking About
CES 2019 arrived with foldable phones at the centre of every conversation, and for the first time in years the question of what a phone could be felt genuinely open again.
The Tech Industry at the End of 2018 and the Chill in the Air
The end of 2018 felt different from the ends of the years that had come before it. The confidence that had characterised the tech industry for a decade was showing cracks.
React Hooks: Rethinking How We Write Components
Dan Abramov announced React Hooks at ReactConf 2018. The room went quiet, then the Twitter responses started. Hooks changed how we write React components more profoundly than anything since the library launched.
Google+ Is Shutting Down and the Lessons Are Worth Keeping
Google announced the shutdown of Google+ in October 2018 following a data exposure it had chosen not to disclose. The product had failed years earlier. The disclosure situation was new.
The Voice Assistant War Nobody Was Winning
By late 2018, Alexa was in hundreds of products, Google Assistant was on more phones, and Siri was on more devices than either. Nobody had figured out what people actually wanted to do with them.
Apple Reaches a Trillion Dollars and What That Number Means
Apple became the first publicly traded US company to reach a one trillion dollar market capitalisation on August 2, 2018. The milestone invited a question worth asking.
GDPR: What the First Month of Enforcement Actually Changed
GDPR went into effect on May 25, 2018. The internet did not break. The cookie banners arrived. The actual enforcement took longer.
Google Duplex and the Uncanny Valley of AI Voice
At Google I/O, a recording played of an AI making a haircut appointment by phone. The AI said um and uh convincingly. The reaction was complicated.
GDPR Changed How We Build Software, For Better and Worse
GDPR came into force on 25 May 2018. The software industry spent the preceding year either preparing carefully or panicking. I saw both approaches close up. Here is what actually changed.
The Day Zuckerberg Testified and What Changed After
Mark Zuckerberg testified before the US Congress in April 2018. The questions revealed how poorly most legislators understood the business they were attempting to regulate.
JAMstack and the Static Site Renaissance
Static sites were considered old fashioned. Then JAMstack arrived and suddenly static was the sophisticated option. Pre-rendering, CDN distribution, and decoupled architecture made it interesting again.
Falcon Heavy and the Launch That Made the New Space Race Real
SpaceX launched the Falcon Heavy on February 6, 2018. Three boosters, two of which landed simultaneously. A Tesla Roadster as the payload. It was serious engineering wrapped in theatre.
Meltdown, Spectre and the CPU Flaw That Was Everywhere
Two vulnerabilities disclosed in January 2018 affected nearly every processor made in the last two decades. The fix itself caused performance problems that took months to understand.
Bitcoin at the Peak and What the Mania Revealed
Bitcoin touched nineteen thousand dollars in December 2017. The conversations happening around it revealed more about the moment than the price chart did.
The Net Neutrality Fight and Why It Mattered
The FCC was preparing to vote on eliminating net neutrality rules. The debate was about internet infrastructure. The stakes were about who controls what you can access online.
The Year Bitcoin Entered the Mainstream Conversation
Bitcoin crossed ten thousand dollars and suddenly everyone had an opinion. The technology had been around for years. What changed was who was paying attention.
Equifax and the Breach That Changed the Data Security Conversation
Equifax disclosed that 143 million Americans had their personal data stolen. The data was not optional to provide. Nobody had chosen to give Equifax anything.
CSS Grid Arrived and We Could Finally Stop Fighting the Web
Fifteen years of hacking layouts with floats, then flexbox. Then CSS Grid landed in browsers in early 2017 and two-dimensional layouts became something you could just do.
AlphaGo Retires and What It Actually Proved
DeepMind announced AlphaGo would play no more competitive matches after defeating the world number one. The interesting question was never whether it could win.
ARKit and the Augmented Reality Platform in Your Pocket
Apple announced ARKit at WWDC 2017. No headset required. No special hardware. Just the iPhone already in hundreds of millions of pockets.
Python Became the Language of Data in 2017
R had been the data scientist's language for years. Python had always been a strong contender. By 2017 the debate was effectively over. Here is what tipped it.
Facebook F8 and the Camera as the New Keyboard
At F8 2017, Zuckerberg declared the camera would be the primary way people share. Two years after Snapchat, Facebook was making the same bet.
Vault 7 and What Happened When the CIA Lost Its Tools
WikiLeaks published thousands of documents describing CIA hacking capabilities. The implications were less about espionage and more about the software we all rely on.
TensorFlow Made AI Accessible to Engineers, Not Just Researchers
Google open-sourced TensorFlow in late 2015. By 2017, it had become the default framework for machine learning. What made it special was not the algorithms. It was the engineering.
Alexa, Are You Ready? The Smart Speaker Moment at CES 2017
CES 2017 was full of screens and gadgets as usual. But the product everyone kept coming back to was a small cylinder that just listened.
Fake News, the Platforms, and the End of 2016
The end of 2016 closed with a question that the technology industry had been avoiding. What were the platforms responsible for, and what were they not?
AWS re:Invent 2016 and the Serverless Moment
At AWS re:Invent 2016, Lambda had been generally available for two years. The conference made it clear that serverless was no longer a curiosity. It was a category.
GraphQL vs REST: What the Hype Got Right and Wrong
Facebook open-sourced GraphQL in 2015. By 2016, the developer community had split into two camps. I was in the sceptical camp. Then I built something with it and changed my mind, partly.
The Galaxy Note 7 Recall and What Happened When a Phone Caught Fire
The Samsung Galaxy Note 7 launched in August 2016 and was recalled by September after units started catching fire. The replacement units also caught fire. The product was eventually killed.
Pokémon Go and the Summer Augmented Reality Went Mainstream
In the summer of 2016, Pokémon Go did something augmented reality had been struggling to do for years. It became a mass cultural phenomenon almost overnight.
Progressive Web Apps and the Promise of One Codebase
Google pushed hard on Progressive Web Apps in 2016. Service workers, offline support, push notifications, and home screen installation. The vision was compelling even if the execution was uneven.
Brexit, the Tech Industry, and the Beginning of an Uncertain Decade
On June 23, 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union. The technology industry’s reaction was a mix of immediate market panic and longer-term planning that would take years to play out.
Google I/O 2016, Assistant, and the Bet on Conversational Computing
Google I/O 2016 introduced Google Assistant and Google Home. The strategy was about more than chasing Amazon. It was about positioning for the next way people would interact with computers.
Why Kubernetes Won the Container Orchestration Wars
In 2016 there were three serious container orchestration systems. By the end of the year, Kubernetes was clearly winning. Here is why it beat Docker Swarm and Apache Mesos.
AlphaGo Defeats Lee Sedol and the Move That Stopped Conversations
In March 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol four games to one. One of those games contained a move so unusual that Go commentators stopped talking when it was played.
Apple Versus the FBI and the Encryption Debate Made Real
The FBI demanded Apple help unlock an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers. Apple refused. The case forced a debate that had been theoretical to become specific.
CES 2016 and the Arrival of Consumer VR
CES 2016 was the show floor where consumer virtual reality stopped being a research project. The Oculus Rift had a confirmed launch date. The HTC Vive was demonstrable. The category was real.
How Streaming Took Over at the End of 2015
By the end of 2015, the shift from owned media to streaming had reached a tipping point that would not reverse. The infrastructure was ready. The expectations had changed.
ES6 Was the JavaScript Update We Had Been Waiting For
Arrow functions, destructuring, promises, modules. ES6 arrived in 2015 and suddenly writing JavaScript felt like writing a real programming language.
Android Marshmallow, the Surface Book, and the Hardware Convergence of October 2015
In a single week of October 2015, Android Marshmallow shipped, Microsoft launched its first laptop, and Apple released the iPad Pro. Each was small on its own. Together they sketched a future.
Why React Felt Different From Everything Before It
React was not the first JavaScript framework. It was not even obviously the best one. But something about the way it thought about UI made it click in a way Angular and Backbone never quite did for me.
The Honest Truth About Microservices in 2015
Microservices were everywhere in 2015. The conference talks made them sound inevitable. The reality I saw was more complicated: teams solving distributed systems problems they did not have before.
Windows 10 Launches and Microsoft Tries to Move On
Windows 10 launched on July 29, 2015. Microsoft skipped Windows 9 entirely and offered the upgrade free to most existing Windows users. The strategy was about more than the OS itself.
The Rise of DevOps Was Not About Tools
Everyone thought DevOps was about Jenkins and Ansible. The teams that actually succeeded figured out it was about removing the wall between the people who build software and the people who run it.
Google I/O 2015, Android M and Photos as a Standalone Product
Google I/O 2015 announced Android M and a new standalone Google Photos product. The Photos announcement turned out to matter more than the OS update.
Apple Watch Launches and the Search for the Next Category
The Apple Watch went on sale in April 2015. The first product Apple had launched in a new category since the iPad. The reaction was complicated.
Docker Changed Everything and Most People Missed It
In early 2015 I watched a colleague containerise an app in twenty minutes that had taken three days to set up on a new server. That was the moment I understood what Docker actually was.
Configuration Drift and Why Manual Setup Keeps Failing
Everything works perfectly until you try to recreate it somewhere else. That is when the problems start. I have been noticing a pattern and it has a name: configuration drift.
Virtual Machines vs Bare Metal: Where Performance Still Matters
Everyone around me keeps saying the same thing lately: just spin up a VM, it's easier. And they're not wrong. But I've started noticing something strange, sometimes things feel just a bit slower, and nobody can really explain why.