Rob Janssen

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Pac-Man’s Siren Call — Backchannel — Medium

Friday, May 21, 2010, might have been a usual Friday for most. For me, however, it could hardly have been more unusual. This was the day I broke Twitter. The day I talked to my father for the last time. The day something I made was experienced by hundreds of millions of people.

Monitor madness, part one

Locks are tricky; I thought today I’d talk a bit about some of the pitfalls of locking that you might not have seen before. As you probably know, the lock statement in C# is a syntactic sugar for the use of a monitor, so I’ll use the terms “lock” and “monitor” somewhat interchangeably.

How Chinese Tinder clone screws you

TL;DR: Chinese Tinder clone Tantan is endangering young women and men by failing to use encryption and exposing private data like that made public in the Ashley Madison hack, information which resulted in destroyed relationships and multiple deaths.

10 Typical Mistakes in Specs

There is a great book called Software Requirements written by Karl Wiegers about, well, software requirements. It's a must read for every software engineer, in my opinion.

Shipping a New Mindset with SQLite in Windows 10

How do you ship over 200 Data Access APIs that work across half a dozen different types of devices and have a 100% test coverage, but with only a couple of days of engineering effort? It’s simple, you ship SQLite.

Looking Ahead to C# 7 with Mads Torgersen

Mads is a terrific person so I thought I would stop in to bug him about C#. For the first 15-20 minutes he mentions some of the C# 6 features you should be already using. For the balance of the video he talks about where C# is headed and some of the thinking behind some new features.

Crazily fast hashing with carry-less multiplications

We all know the regular multiplication that we learn in school. To multiply a number by 3, you can multiply a number by two and add it with itself. Programmers write: where a<<1 means "shift the bit values by one to the left, filling in with a zero". That's a multiplication by two.

HTTP 418 I'm A Teapot - Just A Joke, Or Something More?

I stumbled across an interesting StackOverflow thread earlier this week. I had to read it a few times to notice what bothered me: it turns out that there is a status code for HTTP 418 "I'm a teapot".

WATS Line 54

I had an interesting conversation with Doc Norton this morning. And it got me to thinking... You know what an 800 number is. Some people call them "toll free". The Telephone company call them WATS lines. Wide Area Telephone Service.

Don’t Destroy Your Dev Team By Growing — Startups, Wanderlust, and Life Hac

This Read-It-Later-list is just that, bookmarks of stuff I intend to read or have read. I do not necessarily agree with opinions or statements in the bookmarked articles.

This list is compiled from my Pocket list.