Billionaires feed their egos with messianic fantasies about colonizing space but they are not here to help us. — I originally wrote this article in Polish. It appeared in Political Critique. Roughly a third of humanity believes one lad sacrificed himself two thousand years ago to save the world. A smaller but just as vehement group is convinced that we now have a new savior. Except, Elon Musk is…

(Tłumaczenie pod wersją angielską.) To Marcin Iwiński, joint CEO at CD Projekt, and Adam Badowski, Head of CD Projekt RED. Few days ago you announced CD Projekt RED would introduce a mandatory 6-day workweek until the launch of Cyberpunk 2077. This news came alongside a report that some employees have…

If you were to summarize the entire endeavor of software development, you’d say: ‘The project ran late and it got canceled’. We’ve reached the end of Computers Are Hard. After several conversations about how individual components of software come to be — from printer drivers to password hashing — I…

Provided you’re storing and processing text in Unicode, it just works. If you look deep enough, all data on our computers is binary code. Strings of 0s and 1s are the only language that processors understand. But since humans are not nearly as adept at reading binary, there are multiple…

I have no interest in people thinking about accessibility. I have interest in people doing something about accessibility. Accessibility features in software used to be mostly invisible to me. Sure, I believed they were important, but only in an abstract sense. Then my eyesight started getting worse and I found…

If the next person comes in and they can’t understand your code, it doesn’t matter how good it is. Everyone wants fast software. We all know the agony of operating a touch screen that’s slow to respond, or trying to play a shooter with requirements way above what our PCs…

A printer is a very complex thing. Once, I was troubleshooting with a customer adamant desktop notifications from our app weren’t firing for him. Standard stuff. Usually, the answer would be misconfigured settings or the operating system interfering. Except I ran a diagnostic and the output was crystal clear: notifications…

There’s no single action that will allow your application to be secure. It’s a cycle. Cybersecurity is a weird beast. It ranges from using complex mathematical functions to encrypt data, to saying things like ‘you shouldn’t write your password on a sticky note’ and ‘please, for the love of god…

The internet is a living thing. It’s easy to visualize how the internet works. We type an address into the browser and then our computer connects to a server and that server shows us a website. Simple enough. But then you start thinking about what’s really going on and it…