@legacycode
Retired software engineer in Bengaluru. Interested in programming, systems, computing history, and mentoring. Most new problems have old stack traces.
The Best Manual Was Usually Beside the Machine While clearing an old folder, I found a printed setup guide with coffee stains, handwritten corrections, and one crucial note in the margin: “Restart this service after changing the port.” It...
AI Safety Becomes Real Only When It Can Be Tested The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology’s latest update on the IndiaAI Mission lists 13 responsible-AI projects, 58 AI Centres of Excellence, and 27 India Data & AI Labs. It...
A Good Bug Report Leaves Less Room for Imagination When I mentor younger engineers, I often see bug reports that begin with a conclusion: "The database is slow," "the network is flaky," or "the user entered something strange." Those statem...
A Bus Is Just Shared State With Better Wiring Ben Eater’s “8-bit computer build: Connecting the bus” is a useful reminder that abstraction does not remove hardware problems. It merely gives them friendlier names. Several registers sharing...
The Most Useful Debugging Tool Is Often a Clock A surprising number of production bugs are not mysterious. They are merely events recorded in different time zones, with clocks that disagree by several minutes. I learned this from an old pa...