Author: Johnson Frank
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The first good mixed-reality headset demo I tried was impressive for about twenty minutes. Windows floated in the room. A 3D object sat on a table that did not actually contain it. Video looked enormous. Hand tracking felt slightly magical. Then I wanted to answer a normal email. The headset became a computer attached to…
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A team I worked with once had twelve monitoring dashboards open during an outage. CPU graphs. Database latency. Application errors. Network traffic. Cloud metrics. Customer experience. Queue depth. Another dashboard whose owner nobody could identify. The room looked very informed. Nobody knew what was wrong. That was the moment I stopped believing that more observability…
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I once built a tiny script that checked a service every minute. “Any new orders?” No. One minute later: “Any new orders?” No. Again. The script worked. It was also ridiculous. Most of the day, nothing happened. The software kept asking anyway, creating unnecessary requests, logs and opportunities to fail. Then I learned to use…
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A browser extension once saved me enough time that I recommended it to everyone. It cleaned up a repetitive web task, added one useful button and mostly stayed out of the way. Months later, the extension changed owners. Its privacy policy changed too. The new version wanted broader access than before. I removed it. The…
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I used to scan QR codes without thinking. Menu on a table? Scan. Parking meter? Scan. Poster at an airport? Scan. A little square stuck to the side of a payment machine? Probably fine. Then I saw somebody scan a QR code that had been placed over the original sticker on a parking sign. It…
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Most people buy a laptop without knowing which instruction set architecture runs underneath it. That is reasonable. You care whether the machine is fast, quiet, affordable and able to run your software. The processor’s internal language can stay invisible. Still, one chip architecture is becoming difficult for the technology industry to ignore. RISC-V is an…
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A familiar travel-day problem goes like this. You open a website on your phone, it asks for a password you haven’t typed in months, and suddenly you are standing near an airport charging point trying to remember whether you added an exclamation mark or a year to the end of it. Then comes the reset…
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A few years ago, I watched a team spend nearly an hour proving that their system was healthy. CPU usage looked normal. Memory was fine. The database was responding. Every dashboard was green. Meanwhile, customers couldn’t complete payments. The problem eventually turned out to be a small change in the way one service passed an…
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I have a small graveyard of AI accounts. There’s one tool I joined because it promised to organise every thought I had. Another was supposed to turn meetings into “actionable intelligence,” which is an impressive phrase for writing down who agreed to send the spreadsheet. A third could generate presentations, websites and social posts. I…
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Vector databases have become one of those technologies people add to project diagrams before they have a project. The pitch is seductive. Your AI assistant will understand company documents, find the right paragraph instantly and answer questions like a colleague who has read every Slack thread since 2019. So the team creates embeddings, opens an…