Category: Stories & Inspiration
Stories of science, technology, startup journeys and lessons from history.
Ryan Dahl Built Node.js. Then He Gave a Talk About Everything He Regretted.
In June 2018, on a stage in Berlin, the creator of Node.js stood in front of a room full of Node developers and walked through…
left-pad Wasn’t Really About 11 Lines of Code. It Started With a Chat App’s Name.
You have probably heard it at a conference or read it in a thread: one JavaScript developer got angry, deleted 11 lines of code, and…
Doug Engelbart Showed the Future in 90 Minutes in 1968. It Took Decades to Arrive.
On 9 December 1968, in San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, a researcher named Doug Engelbart sat at a console and started working on a computer that…
One Missing Length Check Exposed Half a Million Sites. OpenSSL Got About $2,000 a Year in Donations.
Imagine asking a server a trivial question: “Are you still there? Please repeat this one-letter word back to me.” Now add a lie. You say…
Everyone Credits Kent Beck With Inventing TDD. He Says He Rediscovered It.
Here is how the story of test-driven development usually gets told. In the late 1990s, a programmer named Kent Beck had an idea that sounded…
Solomon Hykes Gave Away dotCloud’s Best Tool After a Five-Minute Talk. Docker Won Developers, Not Revenue.
On 15 March 2013, at PyCon US in Santa Clara, Solomon Hykes gave a lightning talk called “The future of Linux Containers.” Lightning talks at…
Joe Armstrong Built Erlang Around a Strange Rule: Let It Crash. Its Famous “Nine Nines” Needs a Footnote.
Most programming advice about errors comes down to one word: prevent. Check the input, guard the pointer, wrap the call. Joe Armstrong’s advice, written into…
Barry Marshall Drank the Bacteria He Blamed for Ulcers. The Famous Story Gets the Ending Wrong.
In mid-1984, a doctor in Perth, Australia, drank a liquid made from two culture plates of bacteria. He had already checked that his own stomach…
Linus Torvalds Called His New OS “Just a Hobby.” Nearly Every Prediction in That Post Was Wrong.
On the evening of 25 August 1991, a university student in Helsinki posted a message to the Usenet group comp.os.minix. The subject line did not…
A Telegram, a Weather Station, and a Late Start in Chicago: How John B. Goodenough Found Physics
Before co-inventing the lithium-ion battery, John B. Goodenough overcame childhood reading struggles and served as a WWII meteorologist before starting physics at age 23.
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