Glenn Fleishman: And yet. And yet. When you desperately want the digital jingle bell to sound off on a particular device, my goodness, what a fuss that might be. Quick: Without picking up your iPhone, tell me how you configure an alarm in the Clock app to trigger on your Apple Watch when you’re wearing […]

Marcin Wichary (Hacker News): Half of my education in URLs as user interface came from Flickr in the late 2000s. […] This was incredible and a breath of fresh air. No redundant www. in front or awkward .php at the end. No parameters with their unpleasant ?&= syntax. No % signs partying with hex codes. […]

Brent Simmons: I led the effort to port our remaining Objective-C to Swift. When I started that project, Objective-C was about 25% of the code; when I retired it was in the low single digits (and has gone even lower since, I’ve heard). […] Objective-C code was where a lot of our crashing bugs and […]

Ricky Mondello et al. (2025, Mastodon, Hacker News): The migration from Java to Swift was motivated by a need to scale the Password Monitoring service in a performant way. The layered encryption module used by Password Monitoring requires a significant amount of computation for each request, yet the overall service needs to respond quickly even […]

Vojtěch Rylko and Werner Jainek (2025): The robustness of this work is ensured by a rigorous theoretical foundation, inspired by operational transformations and Git’s internals. After twelve years in production, Things Cloud has earned our users’ trust in its reliability. But despite the enduring strength of the architecture itself, the technology stack lagged behind. […] […]