Category: Stories & Inspiration
Stories of science, technology, startup journeys and lessons from history.
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.
Patent 4,736,866 and the Culture Shock of the Transgenic Mouse
The 1988 patenting of OncoMouse transformed academic science, pitting corporate patent rights against a long tradition of open research sharing.
Twelve Hundred Liters of Milk and a Water Tank: How Edvard Moser Mapped the Brain’s Navigation System
How Edvard Moser went from a remote Norwegian island to discovering how distinct regions of the hippocampus govern spatial navigation.
Uncaptioned Smoke: How a 1952 Photo Defined the 1969 Cuyahoga River Fire
How an uncaptioned 1952 photograph in Time Magazine turned a minor 1969 river fire in Cleveland into the defining symbol of American environmentalism.
From Akihabara Parts to Antibody Diversity: Tasuku Honjo’s Journey in Molecular Biology
How Tasuku Honjo overcame resource constraints in postwar Japan to uncover the genetic machinery of human immune diversity.
SIGNAL TITANS