An IBM mathematician spent 3 years convinced he was the worst programmer at his company at work. He built to escape that embarrassment became the first high-level programming language in history. Every line of code running on Earth today traces back to that one act of shame. His name was John Backus. He was born in 1924 in Philadelphia, the son of a wealthy stockbroker who expected him to follow the same path. He failed out of the University of Virginia. He dropped out of Haverford College. He enrolled in a medical program in the Army and decided he hated medicine. He spent years doing exactly nothing the conventional way. Then one afternoon in 1945 he walked past a radio repair shop in New York and got talking to the owner and ended up building a radio from scratch in the shop's back room. Surprising thing is he had never done it before. He stayed for hours. When he left he knew what he wanted to study. He taught himself mathematics and got into Columbia. From Columbia he walked into IBM in 1950 with a degree and no idea what he was doing. He learned to program on machines that had no business being programmed. IBM computers in 1950 spoke in machine code. Raw binary. Every instruction written as a string of ones and zeros that told the hardware exactly which switches to flip. There were no shortcuts. No syntax. No vocabulary a human brain could hold in its head. The programmers who were good at it held the entire machine inside their minds. They saw the binary and felt the logic. Backus could not do this. He wrote programs that were slow, tangled, and embarrassing next to what his colleagues were producing. He was not the worst programmer at IBM. But he believed he was, which amounted to the same thing. He started building a tool to help himself. Not out of ambition. Out of humiliation. The idea was simple to the point of seeming naive. He wanted to write mathematical expressions in something that looked like mathematics, not machine code, and have the computer translate them automatically into the binary the hardware needed. He called the project a "formula translation" system. His colleagues thought it was a nice idea that would never work. The problem everyone could see was speed. Machine code written by a skilled human would always run faster than code generated by an automatic translator. The translator had to make guesses. Guesses meant inefficiency. Inefficiency meant the whole project was a toy. Backus spent three years proving them wrong. In 1957 IBM released FORTRAN to its customers. The first compiled programming language in history. The translator Backus built was so efficient that the code it generated ran at speeds within 20 percent of hand-written machine code. Not a toy. Not a curiosity. A working tool that let scientists and engineers write programs in expressions their own minds had generated, and watch the machine execute them. The adoption was immediate and total. Scientists who had spent careers translating their equations into machine code by hand were suddenly writing programs in hours instead of weeks. Labs that had used IBM machines for narrow tasks started using them for everything. The market for computing changed overnight. Then something happened that nobody predicted. Other people started building other languages using the same idea. COBOL. LISP. ALGOL. BASIC. Every language built its own translator using the architectural logic FORTRAN had demonstrated. The idea that a computer could read something resembling human thought, rather than the other way around, was now a proof of concept that anyone could extend. Every programming language that has ever existed was built on the answer to the question Backus asked because he was ashamed of the code he was writing. He won the Turing Award in 1977. The committee citation said his work had made it possible for more people to use computers for more things than any other single development in the history of computing. He said in the acceptance speech that he had not set out to change computing. He had set out to stop writing bad code. The gap between what you are bad at and what you are trying to fix is usually where the real invention lives.

When Andres Freund, Linux kernel contributor & Microsoft engineer was debugging slow SSH logins on his Debian machine in March 2024, he noticed something weird: liblzma (part of XZ Utils) was using way too much CPU power, so he kept digging, and what he uncovered was a multi-year supply-chain attack! An attacker using the name “Jia Tan” had spent two years slowly infiltrating the tiny XZ Utils project, a compression library used by virtually every major Linux distribution. The backdoor wasn’t in the source code. It was hidden deep inside the build scripts. It would have given the attacker remote root access on millions of servers the moment a specially crafted SSH key was used. Freund caught it days before it would have shipped in Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and more. One man, one anomaly, one routine debug session saved the internet from a potential catastrophe. Respect!

That time a man came back to thank judge Frank for saving his life when he was 18. A quite touching scene

Before AWS existed, one company ran the servers for Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook's entire app ecosystem. They owned Node.js, invented containers 8 years before Docker, and Peter Thiel even backed them. Then something happened...

Learn all about Oracle RAC in this video covering #Oracle Adminstration and #performance. #Oracle #Database #Performance #Tuning Watch it here: youtube.com/watch?v=uzliU5uP…

The Microsoft–OpenAI honeymoon is officially over. In an unusually sharp, no-holds-barred discussion on OpenAI’s future, CFO Sarah Friar drops insight after insight at her Goldman Sachs Alma Matter conference— but not a single mention of Microsoft or its Azure data centers. Not once. When it comes to infrastructure, the only name she highlights? Crusoe’s Stargate. That silence speaks volumes. youtu.be/2kzQM_BUe7E?si=7hxG…

A headline from this day in 1953.

When Oracle Database Release Updates Attack oracle-base.com/blog/2025/03…

Labour’s plan to change the law won’t come into effect for a year. But the two-tier guidance comes into force in *25* days time. Unless Starmer acts we will have a two-tier justice system that is biased against men, white people and Christians. I will fight it tooth and nail.

LONGs are old school and you get a lot of benefits by converting them to CLOBs. The conversion is a simple one-line command, but if you don't do it correctly you could be in for a nasty performance shock. youtu.be/dieH_emE82A

🔥📣 Our Oracle AI Vector Search Professional Certification Exam is FREE until May 15! mylearn.oracle.com/ou/learni…

We are on the event horizon of the singularity

Apple has caved to Labour overreach, stripping Brits of vital encryption protections that are available in the US and EU. If Government has access to your iCloud data, then so too do bad actors. This is going to cause CHAOS, with YOUR data. Labour needs to urgently rethink.

In an attempt to meet the demands of the Home Office - demands made on false illusions of providing security - Apple has been forced to entirely undermine the online security of pretty much every UK citizen who uses an Apple product. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgj5…

Jeff Bezos on why the United States has more entrepreneurial success than other countries:

Collection of insane and fun facts about SQLite. Let's go! SQLite is the most deployed and most used database. There are over one trillion (1000000000000 or a million million) SQLite databases in active use. It is maintained by three people. They don't allow outside contributions.

Thrilled to share my first blog post as I join Yugabyte as a technical Product Manager! Learn why I joined, how Yugabyte is elevating Postgres, and my focus on observability and performance. Check it out and share your thoughts! kylehailey.com/post/joining-…

Staggering.... So Free Gear Keir wants to add VAT on private schools which will affect the education of thousands of young people but is happy to sponge another 20k so his son can study in peace... I can't wait for the 'whataboutery' on this one... It will be stunning 🤔

Keir Starmer vows to add VAT on private schools citing he wants to level the playing field in education. Meanwhile, he is happy to accept a £20,000 donation for accommodation so his 16-year-old som could study "peacefully" for his GCSE exam, giving him an unfair advantage against other children whose parents aren’t politicians. Once again Keir Starmer is exposed as a complete hypocrite.