SSL Certificates are getting shorter, and that’s a good thing.
SSL certificates are one of those things we barely notice until they expire. Now their lifetime is getting much shorter. It sounds inconvenient, but I think it says something useful about where infrastructure is going: automate it or eventually regret it.
The Cloud is still someone else’s computer
We talk about “the cloud” as if our data somehow floats above us. In reality, it lives on physical machines, inside real data centres, consuming power, needing cooling and occasionally failing like every other computer.
Why latency matters more than speed
We usually talk about internet connections in terms of speed, but speed is only part of the story. Latency is what often decides whether technology feels instant, responsive and smooth — or strangely slow despite a fast connection.
The quiet genius of caching
Caching is everywhere, yet most people never notice it. It makes websites, apps and systems feel faster by avoiding unnecessary repeated work — a simple idea that quietly powers much of the performance we take for granted.
The internet is much more fragile than it looks
I think we take the internet for granted because, most of the time, it just works. You type a website into a browser and a second later you’re there. Behind that very simple action, though, quite a few completely separate systems have already had to do their job properly.
When one update breaks everything
Two years ago, a faulty CrowdStrike update caused widespread disruption across Windows systems worldwide.
