The Night Watch [pdf] (2013)

This is my favorite tech article. It's satirical, it's witty, it's dense, and it's memorable. James Mickens truly outdid himself with this one - his other works are great, too, but this one is a cut above the rest!

Anything written by James Mickens is worth your time.

If you enjoy this essay, you might also enjoy another classic, "Typing the technical interview"[0] by Aphyr (a.k.a. Kyle Kingsbury, the person behind Jepsen[1] distributed systems tests.)

[0] https://aphyr.com/posts/342-typing-the-technical-interview

[1] https://jepsen.io/

> The systems programmer has read the kernel source, to better understand the deep ways of the universe, and the systems programmer has seen the comment in the scheduler that says “DOES THIS WORK LOL,” and the systems programmer has wept instead of LOLed

Chef's kiss.

His one about threat models[1] was hilarious and also scarily prescient. Specifically

> If the Mossad wants your data, they’re going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that’s shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they’re going to hold a press conference and say “It wasn’t us” as they wear t-shirts that say “IT WAS DEFINITELY US,” and then they’re going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them.

Maybe not the "wants your data" part, but the whole pagers-are-actually-bombs thing.

[1]This World of Ours, pdf: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf