The Most Interesting Tech Reads In April 2022
Jira outage, History of Computing, Hacking culture and more
How Microsoft hired Jim Allchin and destroyed Banyan VINES and created LAN for Enterprise
- The History of Computing: Banyan Vines and the Emerging Local Area Network
- One of my favorites, Charles Edge is a young master
Yet, with incumbents like Banyan VINES and Novel Netware, this is another one of those times when Microsoft saw an opening for something better and just willed it into existence. And the story is similar to that of dozens of other companies including Novell, Lotus, VisiCalc, Netscape, Digital Research, and the list goes on and on and on. This kept happening because of several reasons. The field of computing had been comprised of former academics, many of whom weren’t aggressive in business. Microsoft ended up owning the operating system and so had selling power when it came to cornering adjacent markets because they could provide the cleanest possible user experience. People seemed to underestimate Microsoft until it was too late. Inertia. Oh, and Microsoft could outspend on top talent and offer them the biggest impact for their work. Whatever the motivators, Microsoft won in nearly every nook and cranny in the IT field that they pursued for decades. The damaging part for Banyan was when they teamed up with IBM to ship LAN Manager, which ultimately shipped under the name of each company. Microsoft ended up recruiting Jim Allchin away and with network interface cards falling below $1,000 it became clear that the local area network was really just in its infancy. He inherited LAN Manager and then NT from Dave Cutler and the next thing we knew, Windows NT Server was born, complete with file services, print services, and a domain, which wasn’t a fully qualified domain name until the release of Active Directory. Microsoft added Windsock in 1993 and released their own protocols. They supported protocols like IPX/SPX and DECnet but slowly moved customers to their own protocols.
The Current Thing
- The Current Thing — Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- An intriguing analysis of a meme pinpointing the absolutist tendencies of the internet ruled by a few major centers (Facebook, Google, and Amazon)
sure, the Internet makes possible a wide range of viewpoints — you can absolutely find critics of Black Lives Matter, COVID policies, or pro-Ukraine policies — but the Internet, thanks to its lack of friction and instant feedback loops, also makes nearly every position but the dominant one untenable. If everyone believes one thing, the costs of believing something else increase dramatically, making the consensus opinion the only viable option; this is the same dynamic in which publishers become dependent on Google or Facebook, or retailers on Amazon, just because that is where money can be made.
What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers
- What hacking AOL taught a generation of programmers
- Generation is a useful and well-conceptualized sociological concept, Seth Godin has described it succinctly in one of his recent posts
Demographers use it to begin a conversation about the changes around us. While a birth range doesn’t guarantee an outlook, the demographics and cultural shifts that a group shares tell us a lot about how they might see the world.
— from Generation C — Seth’s Blog
- This essay is about a formative coming-of-age experience of US-based software engineers experiencing IRC/AOL-hacking/empowering prog-culture as an imprinting one
Inside the Longest Atlassian Outage of All Time
- The Scoop: Inside the Longest Atlassian Outage of All Time
- When I read this, I think of Uncle Bob’s sermons on professionality
- And I am also thinking: could I make such a mess myself? Chilly thought.
We are in the middle of the longest outage Atlassian has ever had. Close to 400 companies and anywhere from 50,000 to 400,000 users had no access to JIRA, Confluence, OpsGenie, JIRA Status page, and other Atlassian Cloud services….having started on Monday, 4th of April 2022… A script was supposed to delete all customer data from a plugin but accidentally deleted all customer data for anyone using this plugin.
Coiling Ropes
Professionals put things away slowly so that they’ll be ready quickly when needed Investing time now for time later.
— https://seths.blog/2022/04/coiling-ropes/
1x Programming
Your team isn’t going to have fewer priorities next week or next month. There will not be an opportunity to do the wholesale rewrite that the code base deserves. The only way to improve a codebase is incremental.
- It can be risky to take advice face-value even if they are introduced by
nyears of experience, but I suggest combining this one with the great 20 Things I've Learned in My 20 Years as a Software Engineer - Simple Thread
How I Got a Computer Science Degree in 3 Months for Less Than $5000
- How I Got a Computer Science Degree in 3 Months for Less Than $5000 — Miguel Rochefort
- …on the beauty of hacking mindset and the great use of leisure (can’t imagine the guy has a family:)
