Knowledge Base

the real nevet?

rust such a terrible language only used by pricks?

Atwood's Law says that "Any software that can be written in Javascript will eventually be written in Javascript." Atwood, unfortunately, forgot to add the word "badly" to the law.

the problem of verifying identity: confirming that a principal is who they claim to be. Typically resolved via credentials, tokens, certificates, or biometrics. Precedes authorization and is a distinct concern — conflati

the problem of verifying permission: confirming that an authenticated principal may perform a given action on a given resource. RBAC, ABAC, and policy engines like OPA are common patterns. Authorization logic is where mo

Betteridge's Law: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no.'"

a build tool where build logic is written in pure Java — no Groovy, no Kotlin, no Scala, no XML. If you already know Java, you already know how to write your build. Part of the RIFE2 ecosystem.

Blitz was an open-source JavaSpaces implementation by Dan Creswell — the first Jini 2.x compliant JavaSpace available under an open-source license. Distinguished itself from Sun's reference implementation (Outrigger) by

an educational Java IDE from King's College London. Visual class diagram UI designed for teaching OOP. Backed by Oracle, still maintained.

a string-search algorithm that compares right to left and skips ahead via bad-character and good-suffix tables; Gosper found it independently. Best on long patterns.

a string-search algorithm (1977) that compares the pattern right to left and skips ahead using bad-character and good-suffix tables; sublinear on average, the basis of most fast grep implementations.

a way of building by tinkering with whatever is at hand instead of planning first (Lévi-Strauss: bricoleur vs. engineer). In code: iterate, evaluate, keep what works.

a maker who builds from whatever is at hand, from Lévi-Strauss's The Savage Mind; in software, a developer who assembles working systems from existing parts, not a plan.

a thin Java wrapper around JCA that replaces boilerplate-heavy, mutable-state ceremony with clean, functional interfaces.

Bun is a Javascript environment (runtime, package manager, builder) written in Zig, using Webkit rather than V8. It's a full replacement for the NodeJS toolchain, although it's largely compatible. Supposed to be fast as

a measure of project risk: the number of people who would have to disappear thanks to being "hit by a bus" before a project stalls. Open source infrastructure often has a bus factor of one or two, funded by almost nobody

Computer-Aided Software Engineering — peaked ~1985–1995; promised code generation from diagrams; delivered expensive shelfware and vendor lock-in.

a commercial product (with some free-access tiers) to run Java 8 though 17 code in a browser - which means you can run things like applets *and* swing applications in a browser. There are even IDEs written with cheerpj.