Client/Server

Client/Server

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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

Every SWE knows DOGE can't rewrite Social Security in a few months
DOGE plans to port the entirety of Social Security from COBOL to Java, previously estimated at 5 years, within a few months. I explain why that's not…
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Jacob Voytko
2
Setuptools follows through on a deprecation and breaks everything
Four years after announcing a deprecation, Setuptools shipped it under a new major version number. And then vast swaths of the Python ecosystem broke.
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Jacob Voytko
2
War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged
All of a sudden, without any ostensible cause, Google Docs was flooded with errors. How it took me 2 days and a coworker to solve the hardest bug I ever…
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Jacob Voytko
12
Allow candidates to use LLMs in job interviews
If you interview people remotely for software engineering positions, then you need a strategy to deal with people cheating by using LLMs. One option is…
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Jacob Voytko
1
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