Interesting Snippets from 2016-11-17

• seriot.ch - Parsing JSON is a Minefield 💣

  JSON is the de facto standard when it comes to (un)serialising and exchanging data in web and mobile programming. But how well do you really know JSON? We'll read the specifications and write test cases together. We'll test common JSON libraries against our test cases. I'll show that JSON is not the easy, idealised format as many do believe.

• GitHub - kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood: Curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in.

  Falsehood articles are a form of commentary on a particular subject, and are appreciated by the developer community at large for their effectiveness and terseness. They're a convenient written form to approach an unfamiliar domain by dispelling myths, point out common pitfalls, show inconsistencies and subtleties.

  In a sense, Falsehood articles are a suite of wordy unit-tests covering extensive edge-cases provided by real-world usage.

• Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster | Tim Harford

  We increasingly let computers fly planes and carry out security checks. Driverless cars are next. But is our reliance on automation dangerously diminishing our skills?

• roughtime - Git at Google

  Roughtime is a protocol that aims to achieve rough time synchronisation in a secure way that doesn't depend on any particular time server, and in such a way that, if a time server does misbehave, clients end up with cryptographic proof of it.

  “Rough” time synchronisation means that, at this stage, we would be happy with time synchronisation to within 10 seconds of the correct time. If you have serious time synchronisation needs you‘ll want the machinery in NTP or even PTP (which needs hardware support to do right).

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