Famously, Google used to have a practice dubbed “20% time”: about one day a week, engineers were {expected ⊻ encouraged ⊻ permitted ⊻ tolerated ⊻ known} to work on something other than their nominal work; something they themselves chose. Circa 2011, not long after I joined Google, I pitched a 20% project idea to my… Read more
Reading SwiftData vs Realm: Performance Comparison reminded me of an anecdote from my days working on Shark, at Apple. I don’t really remember the timing – sometime between 2006 and 2010 – but presumably around 2006 as I recall it was when Core Data was still relatively new. For whatever reason, there was a huge… Read more
This is an elaboration of a post I made in a Swift Forums thread, SE-0419: Swift Backtracing API. The question was raised whether an official Swift backtracer should try to support code that doesn’t use frame pointers. Which immediately raised the question – in my mind – of if anyone is still using the “optimisation”… Read more
I just read up a bit on io_uring, prompted by a Swift Forums thread relating to it, and it made me laugh. To a lot of people it’s an amazing new[ish] high-performance I/O system for Linux. Which it is (albeit with some serious security concerns, apparently). A lot of people are very excited by it.… Read more
That was the curious choice of grabline for the article in Wheels for the Mind, the AUC’s magazine, about the Apple internship experience had by Ashley Butterworth, Brett Brooks, and myself. Wheels for the Mind 2006 (Autumn) (cached) They even put a picture of me on the cover, which seems mean [to their readers]. This… Read more
On a bit of a whim – a silly tangent off of migrating to a new web host – I resurrected the ‘frozen in time’ copy of my iTools / .Mac / MobileMe HomePage website. You can find it here, for better or worse. My old website dates back to at the latest September 2005… Read more
I just found this while reviewing some very old backups. Like most things of this ancient era, I’d completely forgotten about it, so it’s been fascinating to look back – as if in the 3rd person – at my younger, far away self. I don’t recall why exactly, but evidently I had to write some… Read more