I got asked a simple question:
“What advice would you give a high schooler who wants to work in tech?”
I wasn’t planning to write anything this week. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
I’ve been coding since I was 14. I’ve worked at places like Google, Etsy, and now Hinge. Here’s what I said, distilled from 25 years of experience:
https://www.clientserver.dev/p/a-staff-engineers-advice-to-high
A few people have asked me, “how do you have time to write a newsletter?” This post has my full playbook. What is my audience? How do I pick stories? Why is writing an outline so important? What do I do after a post is published? What would I do if I had more time?
https://www.clientserver.dev/p/you-have-the-time-to-run-a-technical
My latest newsletter is trending on Hacker News!
It's a story from 2011 about how Larry Page tried enacting strict rules and conventions around meetings, in an attempt to get Google to stop slowing down. These were widely mocked and mostly went away, except for some vestiges that remain like "hour-long meetings are booked for 50 minutes."
One team took advantage of the 50-minute meeting rule in an unexpected way. Read more to find out how!
https://www.clientserver.dev/p/malicious-compliance-by-booking-an
In the course of this, I also went on a long tangent in my research when I found out that sudo can *send mail*. Like, not just send mail to the Linux mail spool with scary messages about your login attempts being sent to the system administrator, it actually farms out jobs to sendmail. Well, not anymore: this is one of the features that sudo-rs is removing.
In my post, I go in depth about historical security issues that sudo has faced, and explain the project motivations in more depth
This week, I wrote about something that I found interesting in the Linux world: Ubuntu is actually replacing their implementation of sudo with a version written in Rust.
There are obvious reasons for wanting to do this: sudo's job is to safely escalate the permissions of single commands. So if an attacker can bypass this using memory safety issues, then there is no limit to the potential attack surface.
https://www.clientserver.dev/p/ubuntu-is-betting-big-on-sudos-rust
What about frameworks like React Native? Looking at Spotify’s job postings, that goes right out the window. They hire iOS developers for actual iOS developer skills, and not for React Native. The only bonus skill they list is C++ experience, presumably because they share code between platforms using a C++ binding.
That only leaves one possible conclusion, which is in the post.
Also, I went an entire post and an entire note without confusing “Spotify” and “Shopify.” Please clap.
