Sixteen years

What were you up to when you were sixteen?

In some countries, at sixteen you can already get a driver’s license, or even vote, and you can even be held criminally responsible. Most likely you were finishing high school.

Sixteen is a very important number for systems programmers. We use it as a base for writing numbers because it makes the translation to binary easier. Sixteen is the atomic number of sulfur. It’s used to set the number of participants in many sports tournaments. The last king of France before the Revolution was the sixteenth Louis. Sixteen is the number of hours we spend awake each day.

At sixteen I had my first contact with a computer and learned to program in Basic. I also had my own FM transmitter and was the one who played the music at parties.

Sixteen is how old this blog is turning. So to celebrate I’ve picked sixteen articles published over that time, and I hope you enjoy them:

1. “The doomsday machines”, published in April 2006.
2. “Lessons from Ratatouille”, published in July 2007
3. “The mysterious disappearance of Ettore Majorana”, published in December 2007
4. “Chess”, published in January 2008
5. “Ask Parnas”, published in June 2009
6. “Stop the clock, squash the bug”, published in May 2010
7. “The sugar king”, published in February 2011
8. “Two out of three: the CAP theorem”, published in May 2012
9. “Defining the problem”, published in April 2013
10. “Sex, pianos and wireless networks”, published in March 2014
11. “Revelations”, published in October 2015
12. “A profession for men only”, published in July 2016
13. “The 300 million dollar button”, published in July 2017
14. “Who is responsible for quality?”, published in May 2018
15. “The End of Agile”, published in March 2019
16. “I remember when all this was fields”, published in July 2021

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