Just a quick update because I’ve been too busy to write much recently.

I’m giving a talk at DConf 2017 in Berlin! D’s been growing strongly in the past five years, and DConf’s been growing dramatically since the first one in 2013, so it’s pretty exciting to get involved. No, really. I often give tech talks at no-name events here in Sydney, but I’m half scared I’ll wet my pants on stage with a lineup like this — in my university days, I used to read all the C++ books by Andrei Alexandrescu and Scott Meyer that I could get my hands on.

If you have a DConf ticket, I look foward to seeing you there. If not, then you can look forward to watching the videos :)

Instead of writing a real blog post, I’m dropping a link to this classic about backwards compatibility nightmares, which you might like if you thought the mess that’s x86 BIOS booting was interesting. It’s a chapter from The Old New Thing, a book by Raymond Chen from Microsoft, based on his blog. Raymond Chen has spent a lot of his career making sure new versions of Windows can still run old software, no matter how badly the old software abused APIs and deserved to crash. Most of the technical details belong to the 90s, but there are plenty of morals for software development in the real world today. If you can read that chapter without ever wanting to weep for the industry, you’re stronger than I am.