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A weekly collection of items and thoughts that I find noteworthy but where I don’t get around to write something bigger about. These might be articles I’ve read, sites I’ve come around, things I learned or cool products I came across.

Feedback is very much welcome - see contact.

Finished  Showstopper! the Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft  this week. Very interesting read. The book was written in ‘93/’94 at a point in time where Microsoft was the rising star of the software world. It took me a while to get into the writing style of the author, but it was worth it. One of the primary people being portrayed in the book is Dave Cutler - basically the ‘father of Windows NT’. In an article to honor Dave Cutler being named a Computer History Museum Fellow, Microsoft further highlights Dave Cutler.

The german podcast TILpod celebrated their first birthday! Their birthday episode is another really good episode, including a retrospective on their first year. Especially Dirk’s view on scheduling meetings and meeting attendance culture resonated with me.

Happy Birthday on 1 year of TILpod - Dirk and Sujeevan!

In the episode they also quickly cover a few tricks for better shell scripts, that Dirk summarised in a blog post (german).

From the BSD department, there is the Call for Participation for the BSD devroom at the only FOSDEM ‘22. If you like to stick to defaults and default applications (which is actually a topic, that I want to write a future article about), I stumbled across a nice repo that shares a config for FVWM (the default window manager on OpenBSD). Solene posted on her blog about building a bandwidth dashboard with vnstat.

Julia Evans posted an introduction to dig - if DNS is still a mystery to you, read the post, it will help get your hands on a tool that will help to better understand DNS.

A friend pointed me toward this nice piece of history: It is about the guy who did the crypto upon which TrueCrypt was built later.

In the last a few years I’ve had more and more touchpoints with netbox. However I totally missed the nautabot fork.

One of my long-lasting loves is IntelliJ - which was the IDE I turned to after I initially worked with CodeGuide (early 2000s). Ever since I switched to IntelliJ, I’ve been fairly fond of the whole JetBrains product family. As such, I’ve been using Goland ever since their first EAPs were released. Am very happy to see that with JetBrains Gateway they finally enter the space of Remote Development. There is now a blogpost that covers the inner workings. Am even more thrilled about Fleet - their new IDE that will be part of Space, eg. browser based IDE. I signed up for the closed preview - hoping I’ll become part of it. Currently I’m trying to find a fairly annoying bug in one of my side projects - for this I’m working on several remote hosts and need to debug remotely. Thanks to delve this is easily possible with Goland as well.

I have been considering giving NixOS a short for a while already. Last week I stumbled across this post that goes over installing NixOS on a MacBook Pro in dual boot.