politics Quantifying the US Cabinet's Representativeness Recently, I was reading this New York Times article about the current US cabinet being the least diverse regarding its members' race and gender since a long time. Out of 24 members, there
economics Capitalism Capitalism doesn't incorporate any notion of social responsibility. But people use it to foster a system of social irresponsibility. So why do humans, who are inherently social beings, end up with a capitalist
Listen I wish it had been earlier for me to get this advice: To Be a Better Listener, Embrace the Awkward Pause. Here's another related article that describes the intricacies of listening in a
software architecture Microservice vs. Monolithic Architectures Software developers are currently discussing architectures based on Microservices vs. monolithic architectures. In part, it was Martin Fowler who triggered the discussion with his Monolith First article. Some of the reactions show quite
conferences .concat() Highlights The first ever .concat() web development conference was a blast! First of all, the organizers have been extremely thoughtful with making sure that everybody could feel safe and welcome. And then they showed
security Designing Software for Security A spot-on note about software design by Colin Percival: Assessing the security of software via the question "can we find any security flaws in it?" is like assessing the structure of
economics Bullshit Jobs That article on the phenomenon of bullshit jobs accurately describes the dynamics of our current economic system: The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on
politics Political Implications of Data Collection A German nazi-party requests the number of Jews living in a particular city, and a breakdown of those numbers by district. And this very data does actually exist, as it has been collected
networking Linux Capabilities One reason why people sometimes execute network services as superuser (i.e., root) is the fact that Linux, like most operating systems, doesn't allow non-privileged users to bind sockets to the so-called System
Linux Displaying Custom Desktop Notifications on Linux Recently, I've switched from a full blown desktop environment (Ubuntu's Unity) to using just a window manager, namely xmonad. (Although I'm still keeping the standard Ubuntu desktop installed as a fallback.) Now I
authentication Checking System Account Passwords on Linux In this post I explain how one can check whether a system account name and password combination is correct. Although the ways to do that on other UNIX-like operating systems are mostly similar,
networking Tunneling SSH Connections Through Tor One good reason to tunnel SSH connections through Tor can be firewalls that block your traffic to the respective SSH destination port. As Tor is perfectly fine with only having port 80 and
