Data Analysis: Why Is It So Complicated? A sense of the depth and breadth of why it's so complicated to conduct and interpret data analysis. Why your models are incomplete and rife with inaccuracies, assumptions, caveats, and limitations queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Minimalist Design for Space Camera Flight Software While many systems drift toward more complexity, we advocate for a minimalist approach, with examples that have performed well in practice, with applications for other embedded software. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler Revisiting Ken Thompson’s sourceless backdoor This article revisits that backdoored compiler, presenting the original code Thompson wrote more than 50 years ago. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Kode Vicious: Driven to Distraction From floats to characters and back again 50 years of doing things the Unix way has left us bereft of better APIs. It's not just the drivers but also the application APIs on top of the operating system. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Operations and Life: #SRE Is Anti-Transactional An API for interfacing with automaters Systems built by SREs are not fully autonomous on day one. It's iteration over time that leads to fully autonomous, functional, reliable service. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @yesthattom.bsky.social

A Practical Guide to Transitioning to Memory-Safe Languages Turning off the spigot of vulnerabilities: a new strategy for memory safety Traditional approaches to memory safety are flawed, treating symptoms without addressing the underlying cause. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @ayper.bsky.social

Practical #Security in Production Hardening the C++ Standard Library at massive scale Our collective experience at Apple and Google demonstrates that significant safety gains are achievable with surprisingly minimal performance overhead in production environments queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Safe Coding Rigorous modular reasoning about software safety Safe coding embodies a modular, compositional approach to building and reasoning about the safety of large, complex systems. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Memory Safety for Skeptics If you're tired of hearing about memory safety, this article is for you. The state of possibility with memory safety today is similar to the state of automobile safety just prior to the widespread adoption of mandatory seat-belt laws. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Kode Vicious The Process: From start to finish While the Scientific Method gives us a way to evaluate a hypothesis, a Scientific Process allows us to organize our minds to form these hypotheses, lay out a piece of code, organize a project, or debug a program. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Operations and Life No One Has Time to Work on Your Project queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... What if you could apply a few basic principles that would help make working on your project seem more attractive and worthwhile? How to work effectively with overwhelmed people to get things done

Moving Faster by Not Breaking Things: Or How Not to Blow Up the Internet People slow down when they are afraid, and they are afraid when they don't know the consequences of their actions. Initial investments allow for a fearless approach to pushing changes. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Guardians of the Agents Formal verification of AI workflows This proof-based approach addresses problems by providing deterministic and verifiable assurances of safety without the need to trust the AI nor any of the artifacts it produces queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Unsolved Problems in #MLOps The practitioners whose job it is to make AI work are scrambling behind the scenes, often more in dread than excitement. Either find a better paradigm or fix the ones we're using now. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Understanding the Harm Teens Experience on Social Media: A systematic approach to mitigating negative experiences online Every day, millions of kids are having preventable harmful experiences on social media queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Kode Vicious In Search of Quietude Unless you're writing only for yourself, whatever software you build will need to work with what others are building. So, the meta question is: "How much communication is required?" queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Security Is Part of Every Critical User Journey How else would you make sure that product security decisions serve your customers? Raise your hand and propose that security outcomes and risks be defined at each step along critical user journeys. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Unleashing the Power of End-User Programmable AI The design of an AI-first, program-synthesis framework built around a new language, Universalis, designed for workers to read, the computer to execute, and ready to be analyzed and manipulated queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Concurrency in #WebAssembly Experiments in the web and beyond We discuss how concurrent programs are compiled to #Wasm today given the limitations of multi-core concurrency support, and also discuss further expanding Wasm's concurrency capabilities queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

When Is WebAssembly Going to Get DOM Support? Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love glue code Can I build my C#/Go/Python library/app into my website so it runs with good performance? queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

WebAssembly: How Low Can a Bytecode Go?: New performance and capabilities Wasm is still growing with new features to address performance gaps. With many languages and many targets, Wasm could one day become the universal execution format for compiled applications. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

#WebAssembly: Yes, but for What? WebAssembly has found a niche but not yet filled its habitable space. We look at #Wasm wins and losses, identify patterns, and extract commonalities. From those, we predict the future. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @wingolog.org

Research for Practice: The Point is Addressing Even something as innocent as addressing comes from a rich design space filled with tradeoffs between important considerations such as scaling, transparency, overhead, and programmer control. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

AI: It's All About Inference Now Model inference has become the critical driver for model performance. Test-time compute scaling offers a new, exciting avenue to increase model performance beyond what can be achieved with training queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Develop, Deploy, Operate A holistic model for understanding the costs and value of software development: - Tensions between factors - 4 distinct forms of impact - Warning against measuring against unknown counterfactuals - Consensus mechanism for estimating DDR costs. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Generative AI at the Edge: Challenges and Opportunities We will soon see embodied, federated, and cooperative models become commonplace, enhancing our lives in the background. However, these models won't just compute; they will communicate, create, and adapt. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

The Soft Side of Software: Peer Mentoring Stop waiting for a senior mentor to appear. Your peers are some of the most valuable mentors you'll ever find. Leverage those relationships, share insights, and bring value to every conversation. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Kode Vicious: Can't We Have Nice Things? Careful crafting and the longevity of code We build apparatus to show some effect. This is how empiricists operate. They have a hunch, build an apparatus, run an experiment, refine the hunch, and then wash, rinse, and repeat. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Drill Bits Sandboxing: Foolproof Boundaries vs. Unbounded Foolishness Sandboxing mitigates risks of software so large, it's likely to harbor security vulnerabilities To safely harness useful yet opaque libraries, a simple mechanism provides confinement—or does it? queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Operations and Life A Clean Approach to Process Optimization My soap-loading technique isn't revolutionary, but it demonstrates process design: You can eliminate delays in starting a process by front-loading tasks whenever possible. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @yesthattom.bsky.social

Kode Vicious Analyzing Krazy Kode Code communicates our intentions to other humans. Code, like prose, has style and color and subtlety. When you open a function and start reading, try to think, "How do I feel about reading this." queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

From Function Frustrations to Framework Flexibility Fixing tool calls with indirection The principle of indirection can be applied to introduce a paradigm shift: replacing direct value manipulation with symbolic reasoning using named variables. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

How to Evaluate AI that's Smarter than Us Evaluating AI models that surpass human expertise in the task at hand presents unique challenges. Exploring three strategies: functional correctness, AI-as-a-judge, and comparative evaluation queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @chiphuyen.bsky.social

String Matching at Scale: A call for interdisciplinary collaboration and better-directed resources Software engineering is an open-world problem with multiple decentralized players. Abstraction can be a treacherous pathway. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Fifty Years of Open Source Software Supply Chain Security We are all struggling with a massive shift that has happened in the past 10 or 20 years in the software industry. For decades, software reuse was only a lofty goal. Now it's very real. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @swtch.com

The Surprise of Multiple Dependency Graphs It should be easy to avoid installing vulnerable OS software, but dependency graphs are complex. Developers and users of a package may end up with different graphs, leading to vulnerabilities. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

The Soft Side of Software My Career-limiting Communication Use punchy visuals to make content easier to digest with your most important points clearly highlighted. Be thoughtful about your content. You've got a lot riding on it. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @katematsuda.bsky.social

Systems Correctness Practices at AWS: Leveraging Formal and Semi-formal Methods Building reliable and secure software requires a range of approaches to reason about systems correctness. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Intermediate Representations for the Datacenter Computer: Lowering the Burden of Robust and Performant Distributed Systems Raised level of abstraction and support for universal data formats means new avenues for leveraging heterogeneous computing targets queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Simulation: An Underutilized Tool in Distributed Systems Simulation has a huge role to play in AI systems: We need an efficient, fast, and cost-effective way to train AI agents to operate in our infrastructure, and simulation absolutely provides that capability. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Operations and Life Give Engineers Problems, Not Solutions This is about providing the "why" instead of the "how." Instead of dictating specific solutions, present the problem and desired outcome, and let your team figure out how to solve it. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... @yesthattom.bsky.social

#KodeVicious The Drunken Plagiarists Working with Co-pilots The trick of an LLM is to use a little randomness and a lot of text to Gauss the next word in a sentence. Seems trivial and not a measure of intelligence. But it's clever and does have some applications queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

#DrillBits Retrofitting: Principles and Practice Saddling time-tested workhorse software with unexpected new burdens is often the best way to seize an opportunity or trounce a perennial annoyance, but adding radically new functionality to production code isn't easy. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

You Don't Know Jack About AI... And ChatGPT probably doesn't either For a long time, it was hard to pin down what exactly AI was. Fast-forward to 2024, and we all now know exactly what AI is. AI = ChatGPT. Or not. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

Kode Vicious Building on Shaky Ground queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i... The CrowdStrike catastrophe happened because of architectural issues in hardware and in systems software. We should be building systems that make writing a virus difficult, not child's play.

The Bikeshed: Civics is Boring. So, Let's Encrypt Something! IT professionals can either passively suffer political solutions or participate in the process to achieve something better. queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?i...

ACM Queue special issue on #accessibility queue.acm.org/issuedetail.... 6 articles by Stacy Branham, Shahtab Wahid, Chris Fleizach, Jeffrey Bigham, Juanami Spencer, Vinnie Donati, and others, representing accessibility practices at Bloomberg, Microsoft, and Apple