Publications

This recent book by Pradip Ninan Thomas approaches the phenomenon of digital platforms, digitalization, and Big Tech from a non-Western, cultural perspective, which makes it a very welcome contribution to the study of digitalization.

Coverage? Testing is one of the most important step of code validation. One would argue that an untested code is akin to a rogue program destroying what it can in its way. But what tests the testing? How do you know that your testing infrastructure is indeed simulating most behaviors…

What is Nix? I recently had the opportunity to play with Nix, which is a package manager and an OS based on this package manager. Nix is special in the sense that it claims to only make reproducible builds that can’t break the system. But how? The package manager is…

  vs. Today we looked at the following article, which compares Rust and Haskell: https://serokell.io/blog/rust-vs-haskell Even though I did some dabbling in Haskell, I never understood how close the two are. Currently I think I’m quite proficient in Rust, so I can follow the article quite well on that side.…

This extremely well documented and researched book introduces the reader to some novel areas of platformization, namely the platformization of actors that manage information, knowledge and intelligence.

Juan Montero and Matthias Finger's book provides a valuable exploration of digital platforms' ascent and impacts, addressing their market disruption and potential regulatory strategies for mitigating adverse effects.

During the month of December, Advent of Code passes out a new puzzle every day. The daily challenges are a fun way to learn new algorithms and getting to know new ways of programming. In our software engineering team we followed along at least the first half of the programming challenges…

Why? Nowadays, Linux is deployed in many component of the network fabric. Your home NAT probably runs it, your datacenter’s router also. As it needs to handle incoming packet on gigabits links, the speed at which the system handles the packets becomes important. If you run your router in user-space,…

In this book Lehdonvirta powerfully argues that we we are mistaken to consider digital platforms as being businesses that operate in a market. Rather, they are “governments” or “virtual states”, with the only difference being that their leaders enjoy immense power without a commensurate level of accountability.

For a side-project of mine I’m looking at Kademlia (Wikipedia), which is used in peer-to-peer (P2P) systems. One problem of P2P systems is that nodes come and go randomly. So it’s not easy to retrieve stored data. Where to store data? And then how to find it again? What happens…

DevOps is rather a confusing term. Everyone uses it a lot and not everyone is able to define what it really means. Here are some thoughts of what our team think when we hear DevOps: CI/CD. Source-code, compilation. Kubernetes, Ops responsabilities. Automated tests. These are some good talking point, as…

Some time ago I read the developer skill matrix and thought it was very interesting. I put it in the infamous “Read later” bookmark folder, and actually came back to it! So last Monday, during our regular group catchup time, I presented this page. In fact every week one of…

In “Click here to Kill Everybody”, computer security, privacy, and cryptography specialist Bruce Schneier argues for the pressing need for greater internet security in the wake of the unrelenting expansion of the Internet into our physical world, specifically the Internet of Things (IoT).