• 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 recovery, better design, higher trust; risks: performative rituals without follow‑through.
• Add action tracking, owner, due dates, and review loops. (more…)
• 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 2021.
• Outcomes: lower blood lead, crime‑rate correlations, cleaner air; future focuses on legacy soils, aviation gas, and battery recycling. 🌍 (more…)
For years, small sites treated HTTPS as optional—expensive certificates, manual renewals, and mysterious CSR rituals kept it rare. Then Let’s Encrypt launched public beta in 2015 and scaled in 2016 with the ACME protocol: automated, free TLS certificates on cron‑like schedules. Within a few years, web telemetry flipped: more than half of page loads arrived over HTTPS, then most (see Let’s Encrypt, Transport Layer Security). 🔐 (more…)
At midnight on January 1, 1983, engineers did something rare: they coordinated a global protocol flip. The ARPANET, stitched together by experimental protocols like NCP, adopted TCP/IP in a planned cutover dubbed Flag Day. It was the moment many historians mark as the Internet’s birth (see History of the Internet, Transmission Control Protocol). 🌐🚩 (more…)
One ordinary morning, I walked up to the mirror and for a moment I paused. I didn’t recognise the person staring back at me. It wasn’t that I had changed physically — I looked the same, wore the same clothes, lived the same life. But internally, I had shifted. Something fundamental had snapped into place. I was no longer the same person.
This article explores that moment — that turning point — and what it means to wake up to a new version of yourself. It’s a story, yes, but also a map: how we get to that moment, what happens next, and how you might arrive there too. I’ll use lived experience, reflections, and practical ideas to help turn that mirror-moment into meaningful change.
If you’ve ever seen mojibake—garbled text like ’ and ç—you’ve met the ghosts of competing encodings. The quiet revolution that exorcised them was UTF‑8, a clever way to encode Unicode that made ASCII‑era systems and global scripts coexist (see UTF‑8, Unicode). 🌐 (more…)
On a summer day in 1974, a cashier slid a ten-pack of Wrigley’s gum across a glass window. A machine beeped. Price and product flashed on a screen without anyone touching a key. That beep launched a quiet revolution: the UPC barcode turning packaging into data and retail into a real-time system. 🛒
Picture a map crowded with ports. Now overlay it with straight lines—ships to rails to trucks—snapping at perfect right angles. What coordinates that choreography is a rectangular box with corner castings, agreed dimensions, and standardized locks. That box—the intermodal container—reduced touches, reduced theft, and reduced time, and in doing so reduced the world. 🚢📦
Late on May 1, 2000 (UTC May 2), the U.S. government turned off Selective Availability (SA)—the intentional signal distortion that kept civilian GPS readings fuzzy. Overnight, backyard receivers tightened from ~100 meters to ~10. What changed wasn’t the satellites in orbit but the policy governing their signals. That one decision unlocked consumer navigation, geocaching, app‑based mapping, precision farming, and global logistics at scale. (more…)