Alibaba IPO’d Friday at $25 billion, the biggest IPO in history, and most of the world outside Asia met Jack Ma for the first time via a stock ticker. A former English teacher built China’s Amazon-eBay-PayPal combo and the US markets treated it like a moon landing. My mental map of “tech” is embarrassingly one-country and this fortnight fixed some of that. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus launched, lines around blocks, 10 million sold opening weekend, and within days the internet discovered the big one can bend in your pocket. “Bendgate” is trending; Apple says nine customers complained. Somewhere a materials engineer is having the healthcare.gov experience. Structural rigidity: also a capacity dimension. ...

Confirmed: Amazon bought Twitch for about $970 million. Called it. (I called it after the rumors told me to call it. This counts.) The ugly story of the fortnight: hundreds of celebrities’ private photos leaked from iCloud accounts. Early panic said “iCloud was hacked,” but the emerging picture is more mundane and scarier: targeted phishing and password guessing, plus a find-my-phone endpoint that reportedly didn’t rate-limit login attempts. No zero-day, just the oldest tricks against the weakest links. At work we turned on mandatory 2FA for everything the same week. Should’ve been years ago. It always should’ve been years ago. ...

The rumor all summer was YouTube buying Twitch, but this week the whispers flipped to Amazon. Amazon? The books-and-AWS company buying the watch-people-play-games company? Except, think about it for one minute and it’s obvious: Twitch is one of the biggest bandwidth consumers in America and AWS sells bandwidth. It’s a customer acquisition and an infrastructure flex. If it closes, filing under “the boring infrastructure company wins again.” I watch Twitch most nights now, Dota tournaments while I code my side project. Watching games is a bigger business than my parents will ever believe. The International’s prize pool hit $10 million this year, crowdfunded by players buying an in-game battle pass. Gamers funded a sports league by accident. ...

The entire internet is dumping ice water on itself for ALS research and I am not exempt: our delivery head challenged the whole engineering floor, so Friday afternoon featured twelve engineers, one cafeteria lot, and a bucket line. Hyderabad’s own counter-meme, the Rice Bucket Challenge (donate rice, skip the water waste), also started here this month, and honestly it wins the format war. It’s raised tens of millions of dollars via pure meme mechanics: challenge three people, 24-hour deadline, video proof. Somebody accidentally invented viral distributed fundraising with a forcing function. The growth people at work are taking notes i hope. ...

Germany won the World Cup, Götze’s extra-time volley an actual work of art, and the German engineer wore the jersey to the new jersey office for a week straight. Month-long global fever: broken. I now permanently care about soccer. Add it to the pile. Heavier news: Microsoft announced 18,000 layoffs, the biggest in its history, mostly from the Nokia deal. Eighteen thousand. My delivery unit is thirty people. Somewhere in that number are thousands of engineers who did nothing wrong except work for a strategy that changed. Filing this under “loyalty is a two-way contract with asymmetric terms,” the darkest entry in the Proverbs file so far. ...

Germany 7, Brazil 1. I watched a World Cup semifinal, in Brazil, against Brazil, become 5-0 in under thirty minutes. The German engineer went from celebrating to apologizing somewhere around goal four. The office whiteboard bracket just has “7-1” written across it now in red marker. Nobody has updated anything else. What is there to update. I keep thinking about it in systems terms, because that’s apparently who I am now. Brazil didn’t lose to one failure, they cascaded. Lost their star to injury, lost their captain to cards, conceded once, and then every part of the system tried to compensate at once and made everything worse. Retry storm. No circuit breaker. Total collapse in front of 200 million users. ...

The World Cup has eaten my life and I regret nothing. The US-Portugal game Sunday: 2-1 with thirty seconds left, then Ronaldo delivers a perfect cross and it’s 2-2 and I made a sound that scared my neighbors. Group of Death indeed. Work productivity during group-stage games is a rounding error above zero; Brazil kickoffs land between 9:30pm and 6:30am IST, and the office has quietly adopted a no-meetings-before-11am rule until the group stage ends. ...

WWDC happened and Apple casually announced a new programming language. Swift. Just, surprise, here’s a language: no more Objective-C bracket forests, real type inference, playgrounds where code runs as you type. The iOS devs at work made noises I’ve only heard at sporting events. One of them had spent three years mastering Objective-C’s weirdness and had a visible moment of grief before opening the Swift book that night. This industry: your expertise has a shelf life, your curiosity doesn’t. (Proverbs file. Growing.) ...

Watch Dogs launches this week, the “hack the whole city” game after a year of delays. The graphics-downgrade controversy (E3 demo vs. reality) has spawned a thousand comparison GIFs. As someone who now demos software for a living: I have never once demoed the real product. The demo is the dream; production is the compromise. Ubisoft just did it with more marketing budget. The Apple-Beats deal is basically confirmed ($3B). Meanwhile at the work ranch, our account won the biggest renewal in the delivery unit’s history, a multi-year deal announced to actual cheering on the floor. The unit is hiring six engineers, and I, nearly three years in, am now officially Not The New Guy. The kid two desks over asked me how deploys work, and I heard my tech lead’s proverbs come out of my own mouth. ...

Quiet-ish fortnight, which after Heartbleed feels like a spa day. The rumor mill says Apple is about to buy Beats, the headphone company, for $3 billion. Apple doesn’t do big acquisitions, so everyone’s confused: is it the headphones? The streaming service? Jimmy Iovine’s rolodex? Dre would become hip-hop’s first billionaire, which is the only part of the deal everyone agrees is great. At work we’re rebuilding our mobile web app because the data came in: 51% of our traffic is now phones. Phones. When I started three years ago it was 28%. The desktop web is becoming the B-side while nobody watches. Responsive design has gone from “nice to have” to “the job.” ...