Paul Biggar

Paul Biggar

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Ireland is failing Palestine

Ireland is failing Palestine

Ireland gets a lot of support and a lot of love from the international and Palestinian communities for our support for a Free Palestine. Unlike most countries, in Ireland the need for a liberated Palestine is a given, the default, and we are deeply pro-liberation and anti-genocide, having endured hundreds

Meta and Lavender

Meta and Lavender

A little-discussed detail in the Lavender AI article is that Israel is killing people based on being in the same Whatsapp group [1] as a suspected militant [2]. Where are they getting this data? Is WhatsApp sharing it? Lavender is Israel's system of "pre-crime" [3] -

Tech for Palestine

Tech for Palestine

Press Release: https://techforpalestine.org/press-release "we don’t have the right to show humanity towards Palestinians without being silenced or cancelled" - venture backed tech founder, in personal message to me Tech For Palestine (Twitter, Github) is a collection of over 40 tech founders, engineers, marketers, community

Image of Gaza in late October, showing black cloud of smoke over the ruins of a destroyed G

palestine Featured

I can't sleep

I can't sleep. I'm lying in bed every night, and images of Gaza are running through my head. Fathers holding their babies, dead, caked in dust. Bombs dropped on homes [1], on hospitals [2], on schools [3]. Tens of thousands of dead [4] in indiscriminate bombings

Is Bluesky gonna be a nazi bar?

Is Bluesky gonna be a nazi bar?

What happens when a small band of crypto enthusiasts, with innovative ideas around federation and moderation for a distributed social media protocol, find 10,000 left wing shitposters playing in their demo instance? Last week, Bluesky Social, the new and shiny invite-only Twitter clone, had a moment. Some of the

How to fund open source

How to fund open source

Again this year, funding for open source is making noise. Throwing their hands in the air, breathless open source advocates on the Orange…

That party was way worse than it sounds

That party was way worse than it sounds

Last week Vanity Fair published a pretty intense article (an excerpt from Emily Chang’s upcoming “Brotopia”) about Silicon Valley’s sex…

Why would Facebook fire Peter Thiel?

Why would Facebook fire Peter Thiel?

Does anyone else think it was kinda insane that people suggested Peter Thiel should be fired from Facebook’s board and as a Y Combinator…

The tech behind hkrn.ws

The tech behind hkrn.ws

I made a URL shortener for Hacker News. The project itself is pretty simple, but the tech stack behind it is pretty interesting. I built it…

Introducing Hkrn.ws

Introducing Hkrn.ws

Hkrn.ws is a URL shortener for hacker news.

My CircleCI blog posts

My CircleCI blog posts

For the last 4 years, my creative juices have mostly been applied to writing about CircleCI, the developer ecosystem, and Continuous…

It really is the future

It really is the future

Last week, I wrote It’s the Future, a piece that satirized the container ecosystem, lightly mocking Docker and Google and CoreOS and a bunch of other technologies. Lots of Docker enthusiasts enjoying being the butt of the joke, but it was also much loved and shared by lots of

It’s the Future

It’s the Future

Hey, my boss said to talk to you — I hear you know a lot about web apps? -Yeah, I’m more of a distributed systems guy now. I’m just back from ContainerCamp and Gluecon and I’m going to Dockercon next week. Really excited about the way the industry

Testing 3rd Party APIs and Microservices

Testing 3rd Party APIs and Microservices

There’s a lot of challenges in testing your code against 3rd party APIs, so I’m going to explain some best practices that we’ve come up with or seen customers use over time at CircleCI. [Photo credit to @manp] There are two kinds of 3rd party APIs: ones

Critiquing Facebook’s new PHP spec

Critiquing Facebook’s new PHP spec

Yesterday, Facebook released an initial draft specification for PHP. Written by a team of Facebook employees including a veteran of many specification committees, it looks like a serious effort to provide a needed specification to a language that has gone without it for a long time. So I thought I’

Silence is for the weak

Silence is for the weak

In yesterday’s “Vacations are for the weak", Seth Bannon said: “Preventing burnout is part of your job. Staying well rested is part of your job.” While we’re stating the obvious, I have another myth I’d like to put to rest: “Silence is for the weak“. Too

Why we shut NewsTilt down

Why we shut NewsTilt down

NewsTilt was a YCombinator-backed startup which aimed to provide services to help journalists become entrepreneurs and earn a living off their work online. It closed down in July 2010, a total of 8 months after it was founded. A while back, we announced to our journalists that we shut NewsTilt

A rant about PHP compilers in general and HipHop in particular.

A rant about PHP compilers in general and HipHop in particular.

I’ve worked on phc since 2005, and been its maintainer since 2007. I wrote the optimizer, and nearly everything performance related.