Posting on February 29 because the streak respects the Gregorian calendar’s technical debt. (A leap year is a backport patch for the solar system’s refusal to use round numbers. The 100/400 exception rules are the comments nobody reads.) The story consuming tech: Apple vs. the FBI. A court ordered Apple to write a custom iOS build (investigators want it to unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone) and Tim Cook refused, publicly, in an open letter. The ask isn’t “hand over data you have”; it’s “engineer a master key that doesn’t exist.” Every security person I respect lands the same place: you cannot build a backdoor that only good guys walk through. A key that exists is a key that leaks, and see every breach this blog has covered. Congress is grandstanding, engineers are explaining threat models on cable news, and for once my industry’s fight is the fight. However it resolves, the precedent outlives the case. ...

LIGO announced they detected gravitational waves: two black holes that spiraled into each other 1.3 billion years ago, warping spacetime itself, and we heard it. A chirp, rising to middle C. Einstein predicted it a century ago and doubted we could ever build something sensitive enough. We built something sensitive enough: an instrument that measures changes 1/10,000th the width of a proton across 4km, while ignoring every truck, earthquake, and thunderstorm on Earth. As a person whose alerting system pages on false positives weekly, the signal processing is the miracle. They ran blind injections for years, fake signals inserted secretly to test whether the team could catch them, which is chaos engineering for physics, and I’m going to steal the practice. ...

Buried in a Nature paper this week: Google DeepMind’s “AlphaGo” beat the European Go champion 5-0. Months ago, in secret. Go was supposed to be the safe game: more board positions than atoms in the universe, no brute-force path, the game where human intuition would hold out for another decade. It did not hold out. The system learned from human games, then improved by playing itself millions of times. In March it plays Lee Sedol, one of the greatest living players, and the Go world is confidently predicting a human win. The chess world was confident once too. ...

The review happened yesterday. I’m a senior engineer now. Three years and two months in. I know title bands at a giant are their own weather system: “senior” here and “senior” at a five-person startup are different data types that happen to share a name. But my manager walked through the case: led three projects, unblocked more people than I blocked, and (his words) “your incidents got boring, which is the point.” I’ll take it. The raise is real; the RSU refresh vests on a schedule taped inside my cupboard; the imposter syndrome has been promoted with me and now has direct reports. ...

The rocket landed. December 21st, Cape Canaveral: SpaceX launched a Falcon 9, delivered its payload to orbit, and then the first stage came back, tail-first, engines lit, and set itself down on a landing pad like the 1950s sci-fi paperbacks promised. I watched the stream live and cried a little, no I won’t be taking questions. From “full RUD” in January to touchdown in December. Eleven months. Iterate through explosions. Land anyway. Best engineering story of the year and it isn’t close. ...

The new Star Wars premieres tomorrow and this fortnight has been a single global pre-order countdown. Ticket sites melted on presale day (thundering herds: still undefeated, drink), the tracking says biggest opening ever, and our office is closing early Friday because the CEO bought out a theater. Startup perks are fake except this one. In actual economics: the Fed raised interest rates today for the first time since 2006. I was in high school the last time money wasn’t free. The finance-brained engineers at lunch say cheap money is why every app is subsidized and every startup is hiring; if rates keep rising someday, the game changes. I nodded along and wrote it down. Future me: did the game change? ...

Apple is open-sourcing Swift this week: swift.org, Linux support, package manager, the works. Apple. The company of sealed boxes and NDAs, putting its flagship language on GitHub for anyone to fork. Eighteen months from surprise announcement to community property. The cynical read: they need server-side and education adoption, and closed languages die lonely. The generous read: same facts, said nicer. Either way I get to read the compiler source now, which past-me learning optionals would find unbelievable. ...

Writing this one under a shadow: the attacks in Paris Friday night. We have friends there; everyone’s accounted for; not everyone in our extended circles can say that. Facebook’s Safety Check feature, which I’d never thought about, became the most important software in the world for about six hours. Sometimes the stack ships something that matters. Hug your people. Again. The fortnight’s lighter half, for the record it deserves: Fallout 4 launched Tuesday. Announced in June, shipped in November, the anti-hype-cycle, and it promptly consumed my week. I have built a settlement. I have feelings about my settlement. Bethesda’s engine is held together with duct tape and dreams (the speedrunners already found the seams), but nobody builds a world like them. Ship the world, patch the physics. ...

Hamilton won the F1 world championship. Tonight, in Austin, clinching his third title, one year after the double-points showdown in Abu Dhabi. Last year Rosberg was gutted; this year Hamilton ran it back and finished the title race with three rounds to spare. Multi-year dominance, same Mercedes team, same relentless engineering-and-pace system, now with a third star. Post-failure iteration is the whole sport. It’s the whole job, too. (Leicester City are still winning games, so the Back to the Future timeline is off by one sport, but the timeline survives. BttF Day itself was a global nostalgia festival: Pepsi Perfect, self-lacing Nikes, hoverboard demos. The 2015 we got has no hoverboards but it does have a car that updates itself, which honestly Doc Brown would respect.) ...

Tesla shipped Autopilot this week, an over-the-air update, and suddenly tens of thousands of already-sold cars can steer themselves on highways. Software update as a hardware transformation: the car you bought in June gained a capability in October while parked in your garage. YouTube instantly filled with people testing it in ways the release notes explicitly forbid (hands off, filming, one guy in the back seat), because the gap between “driver assistance” and what marketing lets people hear is a canyon with no lane markings. This will go fine until it doesn’t; noting the date. ...