I forget this, because I take all the history for granted and am excited and grateful that I can use create-react-app to summon a vast technological apparatus to mostly paper over the damage for a putatively-full-stack-but-really-back-end weeny like me. But when I have to explain it to somebody, yeesh. It's like explaining the Vietnam War (or, at this point, the war in Afghanistan) to a younger relative. You forget how awful it was until you have to put it into words, and then you feel depressed the rest of the day thinking about it and realizing that everything we could learn from it to prevent it happening again is something we already knew before we did it.
Recently there have been some threads about filesystems, and how they don't provide exactly the guarantees that applications would find useful for providing their own guarantees on top. The reason is because filesystems had to deal with performance desires and many imperfect applications and hardware storage devices in the past. Trying for certain kinds/levels of "guarantees" just didn't make "market" sense, even in an open-source OS. And they do usually work remarkably well in practice ...
"To Wash It All Away" was the last of his columns for the Usenix magazine. Here are all the others:
2014-03: To Wash It All Away: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1403_02-08_mickens.pdf
2014-01: This World Of Ours: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
2013-11: The Night Watch: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1311_05-08_mickens.pdf
2013-09: The Slow Winter: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1309_14-17_mickens.pdf
2013-07: Mobile Computing Research Is a Hornet’s Nest of Deception and Chicanery: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/01_mickens_02-04_1.pdf
2013-05: The Saddest Moment: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/login-logout_1305_micken...
"The Night Watch" is a personal favorite as I identify as a systems programmer. The phrase "I HAVE NO TOOLS BECAUSE I'VE DESTROYED MY TOOLS WITH MY TOOLS" resonates with repeated personal experience.
Then again I just tested my blog and it has no errors in the console in Chrome or Firefox (except for missing favicon which is not really an error):
https://www.oilshell.org/blog/
There is still a small, useful subset of the web that is very functional. And I've even grown to like CSS after writing 100 lines of it by hand. If you have 1000+ lines of CSS then you stop understanding it, and apparently the browser stops understanding it too.
