a tech blog with a cow in charge
The true stories behind kernels, languages, protocols and memorable disasters. Funny, for everyone. And a cow who rules on what’s right and what’s wrong.
$ cowsay "welcome" _________________________________ / Moo! I'll tell you what's right \ | and what's wrong in tech. | \ And what I say is law. / --------------------------------- \ ^__^ \ (oo)\_______ (__)\ )\/\ ||----w | || || $
Five rules written in 1989 by one of the fathers of Unix, UTF-8 and Go: don’t guess, measure; n is usually small; simple beats fancy; data dominates. Tested on real code, with a herd of cows and a binary search that stayed broken for nine years.
LUKS, gocryptfs, age and GnuPG to encrypt disks, folders and files on Linux, plus scp, magic-wormhole and rclone crypt to send them, with every command really run on a cow’s most (un)important data.
Relational databases versus NoSQL: the four NoSQL families, ACID, CAP, eventual consistency and Amazon’s resurrecting shopping cart, with real code on five databases, and when NoSQL is actually the right choice.
Hundreds of distributions, four hundred forum replies, nine different answers. The family tree, Debian versus Fedora, why the hard ones are for learning, why the trendy ones are a gamble, and the cow’s final verdict.
A phone number on an invoice. Five minutes, you said. A cow living in your head does the maths: double it, next unit. Ten hours, twenty days, forty weeks… A story about why we underestimate software changes.
December 1989: thousands of free floppy disks about AIDS arrive in the post. Ninety reboots later, your computer asks for $189 to be sent to Panama. The story of the first known ransomware, and of a very unwise suitcase.
You inherit a house, and in the house a database with 97 triggers. A room-by-room tour of why application logic doesn’t belong in the database, cow included.
You never open an envelope, yet you know everything: six cases solved from the sofa with nothing but metadata. The cow is not impressed. The cow is worried.
Motorway or old road, your own car or a rental, roadworks and “recalculating route”: choosing an architecture with a satnav, a cow and no obligation to follow every best practice.
A list of customers to call becomes a seven-month project in half an hour, then goes back to being a query. A big meeting, minute by minute, with a cow taking the minutes.
Confidentiality, integrity and availability: not a spy agency, just an ordinary day with a key under the doormat, a pharmacy seal and a suspicious bank-details email.
A bowls club needs an app. We build it twice, in Django and in Spring Boot, line by line, and let the cow referee. Contains code, numbers and one WhatsApp group.
