/Entertaining

The Mind Behind Linux (2016 Video)

tl;dr: Fascinating conversation about the inception of Linux and Git, and the man behind them. The initial community involved in Linux was critical. Git was a result of managing Linux's growth. Both projects were to solve Linus' immediate needs. 

featured in #162

Devotion (Audio)

- Peter McManus Elizabeth Ann tl;dr: Podcast episode about Terry Davis, a computer scientist who developed an entire operating system - as instructed by god - called Temple OS, while suffering from schizophrenia. 

featured in #161

The Lost Key Of QWERTY

- Thomas Fine tl;dr: Early versions of the QWERTY keyboard included a mysterious symbol. To this day no one knows its purpose, this article runs through several theories.

featured in #160

The Lines Of Code That Changed Everything

- Future Tense tl;dr: Slate polled computer scientists, software developers, historians, policymakers, and journalists, which pieces of code had a huge influence. 36 selections were made including the jPEG and robots.txt.

featured in #158

This Is Probably The Funniest Codepen I Found This Year!

- Simon Holdorf tl;dr: "This is rather a short post but I find this codepen by Bård N Hovde so awesome that I must share it with you:" Click above to play around.

featured in #158

Ken Thompson's Unix Password

- Leah Neukirchen tl;dr: tl;dr: Leah found some old files that contained passwords of previous computer scientists including Ken Thompson, which she tried to crack for fun. She cracked all except Ken's. It took 4+ days to finally crack and realize what his password was. ♛

featured in #156

Page Weight Matters (2012)

- Chris Zacharias tl;dr: Chris was tasked with YouTube page from 1.2MB to under 100KB. When his code went into production, latency of requests increased. Why? He had unlocked users in new geographies that could finally watch YouTube, albeit with slower connections.

featured in #156

The Mysterious Origins Of An Uncrackable Video Game

- Chris Baraniuk tl;dr: 'Video game archeologists' unearthed a maze-navigating game for the Atari 2600 called Entombed. Such games require incredible skill to program as old systems were very limited. The game generates random mazes on the fly, and no one can figure out how this is being done.

featured in #155

An HTML Attribute Potentially Worth $4.4M To Chipotle

- Jason Grigsby tl;dr: Autofilling a credit card resulted in a declined payment so, with detective work 🕵️, the author discovered the issue was a combination of Angular's ui-mask & not declaring maximum input length. The takeaways are 1) use HTML5 input features 2) Support autofill 3) Make autofill part of your test plans.

featured in #155

Everything I Googled In A Week As A Professional Software Engineer

- Sophie Koonin tl;dr: Seasoned software engineer at Monzo dispels the theory that senior engineers don't use Google for work posting a list of all things that she Googled throughout the week for work.

featured in #153