I was running some benchmarks the other day. I usually have a lot of things running (Teams, Chrome, IDE, etc…) but I have to close everything to run some tight benchmarks. When I am done, one of the first things I open again is Chrome and that’s when I realized, why does CPU usag … | Continue reading
A bit of history I’ve been diving into the Linux kernel scheduler recently. To give a short brief introduction to scheduling, imagine a single CPU single core system. The operating system allocates time slices of a few milliseconds to run applications. If every application can ge … | Continue reading
Microsoft GitHub released CoPilot last year, a tool for generating code and auto-completion, that’s been trained on vast amount of open source code, notably all open source code hosted on GitHub itself. This sparked a number of discussions and law suits surrounding the tool. Ther … | Continue reading
Disclaimer: US readers will forgive me for my little knowledge about CostCo. I think CostCo is one of the largest retailers in the US or something like that. I’ve certainly heard US folks and US acquaintances praising it. CostCo exist in the UK, there are few physical shops in th … | Continue reading
The White House just published a 46 pages memo investigating the energy implications consumption of crypto assets in the USA. For context. Cryptocurrency mining operations are going where the electricity is the cheapest they can get. Texas has one of the cheaper electricity rates … | Continue reading
Preface Hello, I was employed by Hudson River Trading (HRT). The company never provided due holidays to UK employees. The issue of holidays was brought up countless times by me and other employees,… | Continue reading
This article follows the case of Entr’Ouvert vs Orange on a GPL copyright violation. The case went to the Tribunal de Grande Instance in 2019 and went to the Court d’Appel recently in 2… | Continue reading
I’ve been using flask, bottle, tornado in production day to day for years, writing plugins for these and maintaining a variety of new or legacy applications that happened in Big Corp TM. Here… | Continue reading
The previous article Docker in Production: A History of Failure was quite a hit. After long discussions, hundreds of feedbacks, thousands of comments, meetings with various individuals and major pl… | Continue reading
This week we’re going to talk about how YouTube broke HD for me and about 40% the UK population, give or take. I moved to a newer home earlier this year and like most places in the UK (even i… | Continue reading
Random Interviewer: “Tell me about a time you had to sacrifice quality in order to hit a deadline?” Me [trying to remember]: “I’m trying to remember… I don’t thi… | Continue reading
We’re going to talk about advanced performance optimization in Python. Let’s say we are processing numerous small json objects in an application. Each object looks like this: ‘lin… | Continue reading
TL;DR Landmark case Entr’ouvert vs Orange, after 9 years of legal battle, the copyright court (TGI Paris) found the GPL license to be inapplicable and dismissed the case. Read the judgment as… | Continue reading
Context This following are hard-earned experience for advancing a career quickly. It applies exclusively to tech hubs, in particular London, the Silicon Valley and New York. Your mileage may vary, … | Continue reading
You must have noticed the rise of monthly subscriptions in apps and online services, trying to force an uncancellable 12 months period onto the user. TL;DR: This goes against the requirements to fo… | Continue reading
In early August, ScribD announced the acquisition of SlideShare for an undisclosed amount. I personally never registered to either services, no clue what ScribD except I think I heard the name befo… | Continue reading
I’ve decided to open a recurrent series “Borked Windows Update” to narrate my adventures with broken Windows updates. In the 2 years I’ve been using Windows 10 (had to upgra… | Continue reading
After decades of software engineering, I came to the professional conclusion that technical debt doesn’t exist. Oh I have seen software rewritten countless times under the pretense of technic… | Continue reading
My wife had the unfortunate fate to be hit by credit card fraud this summer. It can happen to anyone anytime. We all live only one modified-ATM, one shady website or one data breach away from havin… | Continue reading
I have extensive experience with Graylog, Kibana (ELK), and Splunk. Having managed production clusters ingesting hundreds of gigabytes per day in them all, at my current and previous companies. Why… | Continue reading
Amazon AWS has launched a new service last month, name CodeGuru. Only problem, CodeGuru is a major website dedicated to Microsoft technologies. It’s been running for more than 20 years, it is… | Continue reading
I was making a quick project that require to scrape some information from a website. BeautifulSoup is the library of choice. Download takes 1-2 seconds per page, with high network latency because t… | Continue reading
[Just uncovered that three hours ago.] Meow is a new operation scanning the internet for open databases and deleting them. It’s been active for a couple of weeks and has deleted more than 400… | Continue reading
TL;DR If you only have 5 seconds to pick only one, go with AES-GCM. Most systems/libraries do both AES-GCM and ChaCha20-Poly1305 out-of-the-box. AES-GCM (Galois Counter Mode) The most widely used b… | Continue reading
Foreword It’s well known that most programmers wannabes can’t code their way out of a paper bag. As a consequence, the tech industry is pushing for longer, harder and evermore extreme s… | Continue reading
There was one remarkable legacy system when I was working in a | Continue reading
There was one remarkable legacy system when I was working in a | Continue reading
Recently in the news: Yet another company caught using GPL libraries and requested to publish their source code. Let’s cover why companies won’t open source their codebase, no matter ho… | Continue reading
Are banks still using Perl in 2020? The correct answer is no. There is no more Perl at JP Morgan, the largest investment bank in the US. The last Perl code was decommissioned in 2019. Well, since y… | Continue reading
This is the story of a debugging case with a happy ending. TL;DR This is a bug in the glibc malloc(). It mainly affects 64 bits multi-threading applications. With a special mention to Java applicat… | Continue reading
Read the news: Airbnb Racks Up Hundreds of Millions in Losses Due to Coronavirus AirBnb is losing money at the speed or light and that will only get worse over the coming months. The question on ev… | Continue reading
Introduction A few days ago one of the internal certificate authority (CA) expired and caused a wave of SSL errors across the firm. It took quite a while to diagnose and mitigate, with potential is… | Continue reading
Here’s my take on JWT and why I think it’s amazing, after having migrated hundreds of applications in JP Morgan from a legacy authentication solution. 1) Pro: JWT is standardized and su… | Continue reading
Today we will discuss the case of the Yahoo Group shutdown. Yahoo Group was an internet forum and open discussion groups. It opened in 2001 and shutdown in December 2019, all content deleted. Bear … | Continue reading
Skip to third sections for charts. On the one hand, the Great Pyramid, one of the 7 Wonders of the world, built thousands of years ago. On the other hand, Microsoft Windows, the operating system ru… | Continue reading
Docker was on every lips a couple years ago. Every small and medium company adopted it or was about to. What’s left of Docker 3-5 years later? Well, not much. Let’s rephrase the questio… | Continue reading
Some personal reflections about the evolution and death or programming languages. By the forces a circumstances, I had to reverse engineer and decommission a few Perl scripts in an old company earl… | Continue reading
Introduction My first encounter with docker goes back to early 2015. Docker was experimented with to find out whether it could benefit us. At the time it wasn’t possible to run a container [i… | Continue reading
We’re reaching the end of year 2018 and it is time to revisit cloud pricing. The current quarter marks the historic acquisition of RedHat by IBM for $33B and it is a good opportunity to focus… | Continue reading