Elon Musk published a 57-page white paper for the “Hyperloop,” shooting pods through low-pressure tubes at 700mph, then said he’s too busy to build it and someone else should. The audacity of publishing homework and assigning it to civilization. Engineers at lunch spent two hours debating thermal expansion joints. We ship a CRUD app. Also: Jeff Bezos personally bought the Washington Post. Not Amazon, just Jeff, with his wallet, $250M. A newspaper. Everyone has a theory and all the theories are about data or ego or both. ...

Google shipped the Chromecast, a $35 dongle that throws video at your TV, and it sold out everywhere instantly. The interesting part to me: it’s not trying to be a computer on your TV (hi, Google TV, RIP), it’s trying to be invisible. Cheap, dumb, does one thing. There’s a design lesson in there I can feel but can’t articulate yet. Work has entered crunch mode for a big feature launch. I’ve learned that “we’ll just work weekends” is said by people who will not be working the weekends. My first taste of crunch-time cynicism. It pairs well with cold pizza and hot briyanis. ...

Andy Murray won Wimbledon. First British man in 77 years. I don’t even follow tennis and I got chills. Our designer streamed the last game at his desk and the whole team gathered around like it was the moon landing. 77 years is longer than most companies live. Longer than programming has existed, basically. In my world: Dota 2 officially launched out of beta and my evenings are now spoken for. It’s free, which after reading about Valve’s economics all week, I understand is the most expensive kind of game. ...

I watched Neymar tear apart Spain in the Confederations Cup final with the whole roomies in a bar, and when Brazil scored their third I screamed. But the real drama is Man United naming David Moyes as Ferguson’s successor. A banner at Old Trafford already says “The Chosen One.” My coworker who’s a City fan hasn’t stopped grinning since. Football is a distributed system for feelings and I’m fully bought in now. ...

E3 happened and I have never seen a company get destroyed like Microsoft got destroyed this week. Sony announced the PS4 costs $100 less, has no used-game restrictions and no online check-in, and then released a 22-second video showing how to share a game on PS4: you hand the disc to your friend. Twenty-two seconds to win a console generation. My US counterparts preordered PS4s. The other story this week is bigger and darker: the Guardian published leaks about NSA surveillance programs, and the guy behind them just went public, Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old infrastructure contractor. The engineers at work can’t stop talking about it. We have access to so much user data and I’ve never really thought about what that means until this week. Adding “read about security” to my list. ...

Microsoft revealed the Xbox One and spent forty minutes talking about television. Television. Rumors about used-game restrictions and mandatory online check-ins are everywhere and gamer internet is in open revolt. The console war just became the most interesting product-strategy case study of my short career: Sony literally just has to not do these things and they win. Dortmund and Bayern are heading toward the Champions League final at Wembley, and even I, can tell this is going to be special. ...

Google I/O is happening right now, and they merged all their chat things into “Hangouts,” launched a Spotify competitor, and showed maps that look like the future. No new Android version though, which broke my bingo card. One day I will go to a real developer conference instead of watching keynote livestreams on my evenings. Manifesting it here. Work milestone: I broke production for the first time. A migration locked our biggest table for six minutes during peak. The client noticed. The client’s Twitter noticed. And then, this is the part I keep thinking about, the incident review had zero blame in it. We wrote down what happened, why the tooling let it happen, and how to make it impossible. Our delivery head said “you just paid your tuition, the lesson is everyone’s.” I’d run through a wall for that man. ...

I joined the on-call rotation this fortnight. My first page came at 2:47am Saturday: disk full on the database server, because a log file nobody knew about had been quietly growing since before I was hired. I fixed it with one rm and shaking hands, then couldn’t sleep from adrenaline. My tech lead says everyone remembers their first page like a first kiss. Mine smelled like log rotation. The Champions League semis have taken over lunch. Dortmund are suddenly incredible. Lewandowski scored four against Real Madrid in the quarter-final from positions that make no geometric sense. ...

Writing this Monday night and the news from the Boston Marathon is horrible. Our client team in the US has friends who run it. Nothing about software feels important today, so this one’s short. Hug your people. The fortnight before today, for the record: Facebook announced “Home,” a launcher that takes over your whole Android phone, and even the Facebook fans at work are confused by it. Bitcoin went full rollercoaster, spiking over $260 and then crashing by half in a day when the big exchange (Mt. Gox) buckled under load. Again: capacity planning. It’s always capacity planning. ...

YC Demo Day happened this week and the recaps are wild: dozens of companies, two minutes each, investors sprinting between folding chairs. A guy at a random startup meetup swears half the batch will be gone in two years and two will be worth billions and nobody can tell which is which. That math shouldn’t work but apparently it’s the whole industry. Bitcoin broke $90 this week. It was $13 in January. There’s a mini banking crisis in Cyprus and people are saying that’s driving it. My coworker mined some in 2011 “as a joke” and won’t tell anyone how much taught me how to mine it in the office laptop. I read the whitepaper this weekend and understood maybe 60% of it, which honestly felt great. ...