Building better platforms with continuous discovery
When discovery is missing, platform work starts to drift from its real purpose, which is empowering engineers to deploy working software faster and with confidence.
Read moreBase58 versus Base85 encoding
Base58 encoding and Base85 encoding are used to represent binary data in a human-friendly way. Base58 uses a smaller character set and so is more conservative. Base85 uses a larger character set and so is more efficient. There is a gotcha in that “base” means something different in Base58 compared
Read more“AI has been the wild west”: Creating standards for agents with Sean Falconer
Ryan is joined on the podcast by Confluent’s AI Entrepreneur in Residence, Sean Falconer, to discuss the growing need for standards for AI agents, the emerging Model Context Protocol and agent-to-agent communication, and what we can learn from early web standards while AI continues to evolve.
Read moreCommunity Products roadmap update, July 2025
An update on recent launches and the upcoming roadmap.
Read moreChris’ Corner: AI for me, AI for thee
Our very own Stephen Shaw was on an episode of Web Dev Challenge on CodeTV: Build the Future of AI-Native UX in 4 Hours. I started watching this on my computer, but then moved to my living room couch to put it on the big screen. Because it deserves it!
Read moreHyperinflation changes everything
My two latest blog posts have been about compound interest. I gave examples of interest rates of 6% up to 18%. Hyperinflation, with rates of inflation in excess of 50% per month, changes everything. Although many economists accept 50% per month as the threshold of hyperinflation, the world has seen
Read moreNumerical problem with an interest calculation
The previous post looked at the difference between continuously compounded interest and interest compounded a large discrete number of times. This difference was calculated using the following Python function. def f(P, n, r) : return P*(exp(r) - (1 + r/n)**n) where the function arguments are principle, number of compoundings, and
Read moreInterest compounding with every heartbeat
When I was a child, I heard an advertisement for a bank that compounded the interest on your savings account with every heartbeat. I thought that was an odd thing to say and wondered what it meant. If you have a rapid heart rate, does your money compound more frequently?
Read morePowers of 3 + √2
Yesterday’s post looked at the distribution of powers of x mod 1. For almost all x > 1 the distribution is uniform in the limit. But there are exceptions, and the post raised the question of whether 3 + √2 is an exception. A plot made it look like 3 + √2 is
Read moreHow to do your job happier
Research scientist John Flournoy sits down with Ryan and Eira to dive into the recent research around developer experience, including the nuances of measuring productivity, the potential reasons for variability in developer performance, and the impacts of collaboration and competition on developer efficiency.
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