Sports dispatch: the Champions League final is set, and it’s the Madrid derby again — Real vs Atlético, the 2014 rematch. The group chat has already drafted both the redemption narrative and the heartbreak narrative, committed to separate branches, waiting to see which merges. (Yes, other football happened this month. No, I am not ready to write about the Premier League table yet. Some priors need a few more weeks to die with dignity.) ...

Prince died last week and the internet did the thing it does best now: collective, immediate, worldwide grief with a soundtrack. The purple deluge taught a licensing lesson too. His catalog was famously off the streaming services (he fought the platforms’ economics loudly and early, and honestly, he saw the creator-economy fight coming a decade out), so a generation went hunting for the music and found scraps. Own your masters. In every industry. That phrase means something different here and also exactly the same thing. ...

Tuesday was one of the greatest nights of Champions League football ever played, and I refuse to hear counterarguments. In Madrid: Cristiano Ronaldo, 31 years old, playing his hundredth big game, scored a hat-trick to overturn a 2-0 first-leg deficit against Wolfsburg. Three goals of pure willpower, because of course, because that’s the whole man in one boxscore. Real Madrid fed him every ball and he carried the entire team to the semi-finals. Absurd. Perfect. ...

The internet broke this week because of eleven lines of code. A developer, after a naming dispute, unpublished all his npm modules, including “left-pad,” eleven lines that pad a string. Thousands of builds worldwide instantly failed: Babel, React tooling, half the JavaScript ecosystem, all transitively depending on a function a first-year student could write, all discovering it simultaneously at build time. npm un-unpublished it (raising its own governance questions), and the postmortem discourse has been glorious: dependency trees nobody audits, the left-pad-as-a-service economy, “have we forgotten how to program?” ...

AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol. Four games to one. The Go world’s confidence lasted exactly zero games. But the score isn’t the story. The story is Move 37, game two: AlphaGo played a shoulder hit on the fifth line that every professional commentator initially called a mistake, a move with a 1-in-10,000 chance of being played by a human, per AlphaGo’s own model. It wasn’t a mistake. It was better than what humans knew, and it reorganized the whole board fifty moves later. Lee Sedol left the room. Three thousand years of accumulated human theory, and the machine found a gap in it on live television. ...

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. Four and a half years 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. ...