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 floor has block-booked a Friday evening show — the enterprise version of a CEO buying out a theater is forty engineers and one Excel signup sheet. Corporate perks are fake except the ones you organize yourself. ...

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 last Sunday 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. ...

Volkswagen got caught cheating on emissions tests with code. Eleven million diesel cars shipped with a “defeat device,” software that detected when the car was being tested (steering angle, wheel speed patterns) and switched to clean mode, then polluted up to 40x the legal limit on real roads. The CEO resigned in days; the stock lost a third of its value; criminal probes everywhere. I can’t stop thinking about the engineers. Somewhere, someone wrote if (isEmissionsTest()) and someone else code-reviewed it. Did they push back? Was there a ticket? An email chain? “I was told to” is now a career-ending, possibly indictable, sentence. We got a whole engineering-ethics lunch talk out of it at work, and the line that stuck: your commit history is your signature. Refuse in writing. ...

Apple’s fall event: iPhone 6S (“the only thing that’s changed is everything,” sure), a giant iPad Pro with a stylus called Pencil, and the entire internet dug up the 2007 clip of Steve Jobs mocking styluses. Context collapse aside, the Pencil reviews from artists are glowing. Products are allowed to evolve past their founders’ one-liners; companies that can’t do that die with their quotes. The bigger dev story: iOS 9 shipped with support for content blockers, ad blockers, blessed by Apple, on the platform where media companies make their mobile money. Blockers rocketed to #1 on the App Store in hours. Publishers are furious; users are voting with installs; and everyone’s suddenly discussing the web’s original sin: pages where 70% of the bytes are surveillance and ads. Our own site loads 14 trackers. I checked. I’m not proud. ...

Markets had a genuinely scary fortnight: China’s slowdown triggered “Black Monday” (Aug 24). The Dow dropped 1,000 points at the open, tech stocks cratered, and for a day the RSU grant I’m about to sign taught me what “paper” means before I’ve vested a single share. The senior folks were fully unbothered: “you can’t sell it anyway, watch the tape less.” By Friday most of it bounced back. Volatility tourism: complete. Lesson: my compensation has a dependency on macroeconomics I cannot patch, monitor, or roll back. Diversification is the only circuit breaker. ...

Google announced it’s now a subsidiary. Of Alphabet. A new holding company where Google (search, ads, Android) is one division and the moonshots (self-driving cars, life extension, delivery drones, smart cities) get their own letters. Larry and Sergey run Alphabet; Sundar Pichai becomes CEO of Google. The org-chart nerd in me is riveted: this is a refactor. They extracted the profitable monolith from the experimental services, gave each its own P&L, and renamed the parent module. Even the announcement URL was abc.xyz because google.com belongs to the subsidiary now. Conway’s Law says shipping structure mirrors org structure; Alphabet is betting the reverse, that if you restructure the org you change what ships. ...