Client/Server

Client/Server

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With a 3% workforce cut, Microsoft shows nobody is safe
Microsoft's cuts included high-performing engineers across the company. I go over the management dynamics that lead to great engineers being terminated.
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Jacob Voytko
Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room
In 2011, Larry Page became CEO of Google and tried to fix meetings. But his new policies were no match for Google Calendar pedants.
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Jacob Voytko
2
Ubuntu Is Betting Big on sudo's Rust rewrite
Canonical is rolling out sudo-rs by default in Ubuntu 25.10, embracing Rust’s safety while shedding some of sudo’s legacy baggage
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Jacob Voytko
How did Spotify ship that iOS payment app update so fast?
A judge ruled that Apple violated her previous order. The next day, Spotify shipped an update linking to their external purchase flow, among other…
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Jacob Voytko

April 2025

War story: I fixed this bug after 3 months with a shower thought
I talk over a bug from a computer vision prototype from 2009 that required hardware fixes, software fixes, BIOS fixes, Windows Registry fixes, and a…
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Jacob Voytko
2
How did Google's illegal ad monopoly work?
I dug through the ruling that declares Google an illegal monopoly. I explain the ad market and outline the ways the court accuses them of acting…
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Jacob Voytko
Slopsquatting targets LLM coders with supply-chain attacks
Sometimes LLMs generate fake package names. Attackers know this, and publish fake packages under these hallucinated names.
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Jacob Voytko
Bazel is too pure for this world
At the 10-year anniversary of Bazel's announcement, I reflect on my disappointment that Bazel never became a viable build system for small-time…
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Jacob Voytko
Helping Shopify employees game their AI promotion criteria
Shopify's CEO just announced that AI usage is expected of employees, and they will get peer feedback on AI usage. So why not help them out and…
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Jacob Voytko
You should obviously still learn to code (if you want to)
Coding is one of the easy parts of being a software engineer. There are a whole host of coding-related activities and specialties that will be important…
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Jacob Voytko
Next.js middleware was completely optional until 2 weeks ago
I break down a CVE where an attacker could bypass middleware in every Next.js version. What was it trying to do? How did it break? Why do we use…
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Jacob Voytko

March 2025

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