Phlogiston: The Beautifully Wrong Theory of Fire
• Phlogiston (17th–18th c.) posited a fire‑like essence released in burning/roasting. • Collapsed under mass gain in calcination and oxygen’s discovery; replaced by oxidation. • Left durable assets: quantitative balances,…
Read more »
Blameless Postmortems: Shipping that Learns
• Blameless postmortems shift focus from who failed to what the system allowed. • Roots in aviation and safety science (Reason, Dekker); tech popularized via Google SRE. • Value: faster…
Read more »
Goodbye, Leaded Gas: A Public‑Health Turning Point
• Tetraethyllead (TEL) added in 1920s to stop engine knock; mass neurotoxin. • Catalytic converters (1970s) and regulation drove phase‑outs; U.S. ban for on‑road gas by 1996; global near‑elimination by…
Read more »
The Optical Telegraph: France’s 18th‑Century Internet
• Claude Chappe launched a tower network in 1790s France; messages hopped 30 km at a time. • Mechanized shutters/arms encoded alphabetic codes; operators relayed in minutes. • Killed by…
Read more »
Morse Code: The First Global Digital Language
• Morse mapped letters to short/long pulses—a human‑parseable binary. • Born in the 1830s–40s with Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail, optimized by letter frequency. • Powered news, finance, railways, and…
Read more »
Caloric Theory: The Useful Wrong Turn in Heat
The Caloric That Melted Away: How a Fictional Fluid Heated the 18th Century Before energy and entropy reigned, scientists pictured heat as a fluid—caloric—that flowed from hot bodies to cold,…
Read more »
Phrenology: The Beautiful Wrong Map of the Mind
Phrenology: The Map That Never Was In the early 1800s, Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim popularized phrenology—the idea that mental faculties live in discrete brain “organs” whose development bulges…
Read more »
Feature Flags: The Safety Switch of Modern Software
Feature Flags: Shipping Without Fear Feature flags let teams deploy code dark and turn it on later for chosen users. That simple ability—decouple deploy from release—changed how software moves. Done…
Read more »
Repro Steps or It Didn’t Happen
Bug Reports That Fix Themselves: The Art of Reproducibility A good bug report is a time machine. It takes an engineer from “I can’t see it” to “I can ship…
Read more »
Let’s Encrypt: The Day HTTPS Went Free
“Free as in Certs”: How Let’s Encrypt Made HTTPS the Default For years, small sites treated HTTPS as optional—expensive certificates, manual renewals, and mysterious CSR rituals kept it rare. Then…
Read more »