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.” ...

Heartbleed aftershocks continue. The big tech companies announced the Core Infrastructure Initiative, actual money, finally, for OpenSSL and other load-bearing volunteers. It took the whole internet bleeding to fund two maintainers. The intern asked “why didn’t they fund it before?” and I didn’t have a good answer. Keep asking that question forever, intern. Also this month: Brendan Eich, inventor of JavaScript, resigned as Mozilla’s CEO after eleven days. My relationship with JavaScript remains complicated in unrelated ways. ...

Dropping the usual format. This week is Heartbleed. A bug in OpenSSL, the library that encrypts basically the whole internet, lets anyone read random chunks of a server’s memory. Passwords, keys, anything. It’s been there for two years. It has a name, a logo, and a website, which is apparently how vulnerabilities work now. Two-thirds of the web runs the affected versions. My week: we patched within hours (my first all-hands incident), rotated our certs, forced password resets, then spent three days finding every other place TLS terminates that nobody remembered: a load balancer, an old admin panel, a staging box with a real cert. The patch took an hour. The inventory took days. Nobody had a list. Everyone’s action item, everywhere, is “have a list.” ...

The Blameless Awakening (Jan 2013 – Mar 2014) Filed April 3, 2014 — the week healthcare.gov closed its first open enrollment, ending the saga that taught the industry to read postmortems. In early 2013, few companies published real postmortems. Outages were treated as PR problems, not things worth explaining. That changed fast. By 2014, writing an honest postmortem was becoming normal, and this 15-month window is where the shift started. ...

Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion and the internet is having feelings. Oculus was a Kickstarter! 9,500 people backed a scrappy VR dream and it just became a Facebook subsidiary. Backers got a t-shirt, Facebook gets the metaverse. Notch cancelled Minecraft-for-Oculus in protest within hours. The gamer in me is betrayed; the guy who watched the WhatsApp deal last month just adds a row to the spreadsheet. Zuck is buying every possible future: messaging, photos, now faces-with-screens-on-them. ...

The World Wide Web turned 25 this week. Tim Berners-Lee wrote his proposal in March 1989 and his boss annotated it “vague but exciting,” the greatest code review comment ever written, and a reminder to me personally to be nicer in PR reviews. He gave it away. No patent, no licensing. My entire career exists inside one person’s decision not to monetize. At work I’ve been handed my first intern to mentor for the spring. I’ve been professionally alive for not quite three years and I’m someone’s senior now? I made a list of everything that confused me on day one. It’s long. It’s basically this blog. ...

Facebook is buying WhatsApp for nineteen billion dollars. Fifty-five employees. That’s $345 million per employee. The engineers run the whole thing on Erlang, with a legendary “no ads, no games, no gimmicks” sticky note on the founder’s desk. Every engineer I know had the same two reactions in the same order: “that’s insane” and “what’s Erlang?” Darker crypto news: Mt. Gox, the exchange holding most of the world’s Bitcoin trading, has gone dark and reportedly lost 850,000 bitcoins. Possibly years of quiet theft. My coworker’s stash was thankfully elsewhere, but people lost life savings to what amounts to a single point of failure everyone chose voluntarily. “Not your keys, not your coins” is the phrase going around. ...

The creator of Flappy Bird deleted it today. Pulled it from the app stores at the peak, reportedly $50k/day in ads, because the fame “ruined his simple life.” One Vietnamese dev, one impossible bird, tens of millions of downloads, gone by choice. Phones with it installed are already listed on eBay for thousands. I have 100% believed this industry could produce every kind of story except “man walks away from money,” and here we are. Genuinely moved by it. ...

The Macintosh turned 30 this week. Apple did a big retrospective and I fell down a rabbit hole of 1984 footage: the Ridley Scott ad, young Steve Jobs pulling it out of a bag. My daily driver at work is a MacBook and I’ve never once thought about the lineage. Thirty years from “insanely great” to me running bundle install on it while eating a shawarma or a dilkhush. Progress? ...