$ cat /dev/bitstales

Bit’s Tales

Non è un bug, è una storia. Ingegneria informatica raccontata da chi ha letto le man page al posto tuo.

It’s not a bug, it’s a tale. Computer engineering told by people who read the man pages so you don’t have to.

$ ls -lt ultimi-articoli/latest-posts/

Film-still cover: a meeting room with a manager and an engineer, and subtitles translating “real-time” into numbers

Software Engineering

Business ↔ IT: the alignment meeting, with subtitles

“Real-time”, “always available”, “it's just one more field”, “let's add AI”: a one-act play in a meeting room, with the Product Owner interpreting live and technical notes for every scene.

Pixel-art arcade cover: AGILE in blocky letters, a developer, a customer holding a coin and “Insert coin”

Software Engineering

Agile, explained with a thermostat: the customer doesn't know what they want, but they pay (and they're always right)

Open loop versus closed loop, a simulation of a customer who keeps changing their mind and an Agile–English dictionary: why we work in sprints, and what the customer is really always right about.

Cover: a meeting-room whiteboard with a flowchart of ifs exploding into dozens of branches, sticky notes with the manager's requests and the words “One more if, please”

Software Engineering

One more if, please: a function's life in seven meetings

The business keeps changing its mind, a super-manager with a degree in Potato Chip Science has a vision, and finalPrice() goes from one line to a maze. Autopsy and treatment of if proliferation.

It's not you, it's my catch: an advice column for exceptions

Empty catches, bare excepts, endless retries, lost causes and return inside finally: Dr Finally answers your code's letters. Because catch is not always the answer.

Blueprint-style cover: a dimensioned UML diagram of the Strategy pattern with a title block reading “Gang of Four: the handbook of déjà vu”

Software Engineering

Design patterns: the catalogue entry for engineering's favourite pattern (software not required)

The Gang of Four, Christopher Alexander, the H-bridge and the voltage divider: what a design pattern really is, explained with the GoF template applied to itself.

Y2K-style poster cover: “Skip intro forever”, a puzzle piece (missing plugin) and a giant SKIP INTRO button

Skip intro forever: the rise, glory and slow death of Flash

From vector cartoons for 28.8k modems to the most exploited plugin on the Internet: SWF, ActionScript, JIT spraying, “Thoughts on Flash” and the kill switch that even stopped trains.

Cover: a terminal showing Linus's 1991 comp.os.minix post and the “LINUX is obsolete” thread

Linus vs Tanenbaum: how a hobby that “won't be big and professional” became Linux

MINIX, a 386 bought on instalments, “just a hobby” and the “LINUX is obsolete” flame war: microkernel versus monolithic, and how both sides ended up winning.

Isometric stack of shipping containers labelled chroot, jail, zones, namespaces, cgroups and docker run, with a timeline from 1979 to 2013

From chroot to Docker: a short history of lying to processes

Containers, namespaces, cgroups, OverlayFS: 34 years of well-coordinated lies the kernel tells processes, from 1979's chroot to Docker's whale.