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+# Phillip Rogaway - The Moral Character of Cryptographic Work
+
+:::: tags
+- Cryptography
+- Society
+::::
+
+An appeal to cryptographers to ponder on the [Russell-Einstein
+manifesto], consider the moral implications of their work, take a step
+back from "crypto-for-crypto", and focus on "crypto-for-privacy" (or,
+to name the threat more explicitly, "anti-surveillance research").
+
+Harps on FBI Director James Comey's "law-enforcement framing":
+
+> 1. Privacy is *personal* good.  It's about your desire to control
+>    personal information about you.
+> 2. Security, on the other hand, is a *collective* good.  It's about
+>    living in a safe and secure world.
+> 3. Privacy and security are inherently in conflict.  As you
+>    strengthen one, you weaken the other.  We need to find the right
+>    *balance*.
+> 4. Modern communications technology has destroyed the former
+>    balance.  It's been a boon to privacy, and a blow to security.
+>    Encryption is especially threatening.  Our laws just haven't kept
+>    up.
+> 5. Because of this, *bad guys* may win.  The bad guys are
+>    terrorists, murderers, child pornographers, drug traffickers, and
+>    money launderers.  The technology that we good guys use - the bad
+>    guys use it too, to escape detection.
+> 6. At this point, we run the risk of Going Dark.  Warrants will be
+>    issued, but, due to encryption, they'll be meaningless.  We're
+>    becoming a country of unopenable closets.  Default encryption may
+>    make a good marketing pitch, but it's reckless design.  It will
+>    lead us to a very dark place.
+
+This framing is dismissed as "inconsistent with the history of
+intelligence gathering, and with the NSA's own mission statement",
+without further explanation.
+
+I wish the author had spent some prose explaining how exactly this
+framing is fallacious.  There is a footnote providing some references,
+but as far as I can tell these references mainly reinforce the point
+that the NSA's surveillance methods are a threat to privacy; it is not
+obvious how "the NSA overreaches" contradicts "it's harder to catch
+bad guys once they get better crypto".
+
+For what it's worth, I found that [Aaron Brantly's
+article](#aaron-brantly---banning-encryption-to-stop-terrorists-a-worse-than-futile-excercise)
+does a better job at showing the shortsightedness of this line of
+reasoning, as does this footnote:
+
+> When crypto is outlawed only outlaws will have crypto.
+
+[Russell-Einstein manifesto]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%E2%80%93Einstein_Manifesto
+
+# Aaron Brantly - Banning Encryption to Stop Terrorists: A Worse than Futile Excercise
+
+:::: tags
+- Cryptography
+- Society
+::::
+
+The debate can be phrased as follows:
+
+> Is increasing security in one narrow area worth degrading it in
+> every other?
+
+Answering "yes" overlooks two things:
+
+1. Weakening officially distributed encryption will not impact
+   terrorists, who will simply move to new, unregulated platforms.
+
+2. Once they have done that, we end up in a situation where lawful
+   citizens are stuck with insecure communication channels, and
+   terrorists are the only ones benefiting from state-of-the-art
+   confidentiality/integrity/authenticity.
diff --git a/reviews/blog-roll.md b/reviews/blog-roll.md
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+This is a list of blog-ish websites where I found insightful stuff
+that I would like not to forget.
+
+# [LispCast]
+
+Eric Normand's musings on programming paradigms and their application,
+with a soft spot for functional programming.
+
+[When in doubt, refactor at the bottom]
+:   Quoting Sandi Metz:
+
+    > Duplication is far cheaper than the wrong abstraction.
+
+    The point being that blindly following the letter of the DRY law
+    can lead developers to add complexity to extracted functions
+    because "it almost does what I want; if I could add just one more
+    parameter to it…".
+
+    Normand and Metz encourage developers to "mechanically" extract
+    small pieces of logic; even if they are not re-usable, bundling
+    things together and naming them helps make the potential
+    abstractions more visible.
+
+[Programming Paradigms and the Procedural Paradox]
+:   A discussion on our tendency to conflate *paradigms* with their
+    *features*; for example, when trying to answer "can this language
+    express that paradigm?", we often reduce the question to "does
+    this language possess those features?".
+
+    Normand wonders whether we do this because the procedural
+    paradigm's metaphor (a series of steps that each may contain any
+    number of sub-tasks) maps so well to its features (sequential
+    statements, subroutines) that it trained us to mix those up.
+
+[LispCast]: https://lispcast.com/category/writing/
+[When in doubt, refactor at the bottom]: https://lispcast.com/refactor-bottom/
+[Programming Paradigms and the Procedural Paradox]: https://lispcast.com/procedural-paradox/
+
+# [null program]
+
+Chris Wellons's in-depth looks into a fairly wide range of programming
+techniques and applications.  The articles often come with
+illustrative code samples, which are always broken down into
+bite-sized chunks that are easy to grok.
+
+Some recurring topics I enjoy reading about:
+
+- GNU/Linux plumbing
+    - [Raw Linux Threads via System Calls]
+    - [Appending to a File from Multiple Processes]
+    - [A Magnetized Needle and a Steady Hand]
+
+- C programming tricks
+    - [Global State: A Tale of Two Bad C APIs]
+    - [C Closures as a Library]
+    - [How to Write Portable C Without Complicating Your Build]
+    - [A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles]
+
+- Algorithmics
+    - [Inspecting C's qsort Through Animation]
+    - [A Branchless UTF-8 Decoder]
+    - [Render Multimedia in Pure C]
+
+- Emacs Lisp plumbing
+    - [Some Performance Advantages of Lexical Scope]
+    - [What's in an Emacs Lambda]
+
+[null program]: http://nullprogram.com/index/
+[Raw Linux Threads via System Calls]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2015/05/15/
+[Appending to a File from Multiple Processes]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/08/03/
+[A Magnetized Needle and a Steady Hand]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/11/17/
+[Global State: A Tale of Two Bad C APIs]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2014/10/12/
+[C Closures as a Library]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/01/08/
+[How to Write Portable C Without Complicating Your Build]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/03/30/
+[A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/08/20/
+[Inspecting C's qsort Through Animation]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/09/05/
+[A Branchless UTF-8 Decoder]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/10/06/
+[Render Multimedia in Pure C]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/11/03/
+[Some Performance Advantages of Lexical Scope]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2016/12/22/
+[What's in an Emacs Lambda]: https://nullprogram.com/blog/2017/12/14/
+
+# [Et tu, Cthulhu]
+
+[A hash table re-hash]
+:   A benchmark of hash tables that manages to succinctly explain
+    common performance issues and tradeoffs with this data structure,
+    to show results across a wide range of implementations, and to
+    provide very understandable interepretations for those results.
+
+[Et tu, Cthulhu]: https://hpjansson.org/blag/
+[A hash table re-hash]: https://hpjansson.org/blag/2018/07/24/a-hash-table-re-hash/
+
+# [Evanmiller.org]
+
+I mostly only read the articles dealing with programming languages.
+The down-to-earth commentary made me feel like the author both
+appreciates the thought process that went into the design, and has
+enough hindsight to find where that thought process fell short.
+
+[A Taste of Rust]
+:   An overview of some of the language's features.  Some comments
+    resonated particularly well with me, e.g. on nested functions:
+
+    > With other languages, I’m never quite sure where to put
+    > helper functions.  I’m usually wary of factoring code into
+    > small, “beautiful” functions because I’m afraid they’ll end
+    > up under the couch cushions, or behind the radiator next to
+    > my car keys.  With Rust, I can build up a kind of organic
+    > tree of function definitions, each scoped to the place where
+    > they’re actually going to be used, and promote them up the
+    > tree as they take on the Platonic form of Reusable Code.
+
+[Evanmiller.org]: https://www.evanmiller.org/
+[A Taste of Rust]: https://www.evanmiller.org/a-taste-of-rust.html
diff --git a/reviews/linux.conf.au-2017.md b/reviews/linux.conf.au-2017.md
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+# linux.conf.au 2017
+
+## General comments
+
+Re-stating the audience's questions before replying is helpful.
+
+## Choose Your Own Adventure, Please!
+
+Keynote by Pia Waugh.
+
+Warns against short-sighted itch-scratching; wants to encourage more
+long-lasting systemic change.  To contrast with Maciej Cegłowski, who
+warns against [ivory-tower wank] in Sillicon Valley, where no-one
+seems interested in working on the severe poverty problems nearby.
+
+(To be fair, Pia does say we need both "symptomatic relief" and
+systemic change.)
+
+41:30
+
+> My favourite story from my studies with martial arts was actually
+> about two monks walking around.  They're walking along, elder one,
+> younger one, and when they get to the river, a person comes and says
+> "I'm being chased by robbers, can you help me across the river
+> please?".  The older monk says "Yep, not a problem", picks them up
+> and carries them across (because they're hurt).  The person gets
+> away.  And they're walking along, still in silence, and the younger
+> monk says: "… You know, back at the river back there"; the older
+> monk says "Yeah?"; the younger monk says "I thought we had taken a
+> vow of silence".  The other goes, "Yeah?".  "… Should you have
+> spoken to that person?", and the older monk says: "I put that person
+> down back at the river.  Why haven't you?"
+
+That story appeals to me: it's got some sort of
+Jesus-ish-unconditional-forgiveness-Zen vibe that feels reassuring,
+"it's OK to make mistakes, as long as you aimed for the Greater Good,
+focus on the Spirit of the Law instead of upholding the Letter".  But
+slippery slope turns that into "move fast and break things",
+consequences and accountability be damned.
+
+You can even link that to ["fussy" compilers] and false alarms: why
+should Buddhist GCC warn on Vow-of-Silence violation if it's not
+actually a problem?  The warning should be refined, the diagnosis
+should be smarter, the standard amended, otherwise how do you
+distinguish between the shades of red?
+
+["fussy" compilers]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2016-04/msg00190.html
+[ivory-tower wank]: http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm
+
+## Stephen King's practical advice for tech writers
+
+By Rikki Endsley.
+
+Lots of pointers, e.g. [The Care and Feeding of the
+Press](http://netpress.org/care-feeding-press/).
+
+Suggested outline:
+
+- intro (invite the reader in)
+- state the problem (background)
+- solution
+- (for tech article, tutorial, whitepaper: technical stuff (howto, FAQ))
+- conclude (important dates, action items)
+
+Parasite words: "very", "some".  Be mindful of slang.
+
+## Sharing the love: making games with PICO-8
+
+By John Dalton.
+
+> Sad old people, longing for the glory days
+
+PICO-8 restores the "Democracy of Creating".
+
+Kids get the point of sharing without having to be "encouraged" by
+licences.
+
+## Writing less, saying more: UX lessons from the small screen
+
+By Claire Mahoney.
+
+- "mobile" is not necessarily "on the move"
+- a "mobile" app does not have to be a "diet" version of the original
+
+Users do not expect the functionality to be diminished.
+
+> Context can be better than words
+
+(I feel like there is a connection to be made here with namespaces in
+programming languages.)
+
+Patterns are good, repetition is not.
+
+Defining purpose with "when X, I want Y so I can Z" helps "keeping it
+real" and reminding you of the user out there.
+
+## Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Rock Star Developers
+
+By Rikki Endsley.
+
+When writing job descriptions, stop asking for rock stars.  Focus on:
+
+- job requirements
+- job environment
+
+Makes it easier for people to figure whether they will fit in.
+
+Look for developers interested in making *others* succeed, learning
+*new* skills; make sure they are accessible, they use the best tool
+for the job, and they are able to innovate, lead, and collaborate with
+a diverse mix of people.
+
+If you have a rockstar on your hands, make sure the janitors still get
+some credits.
+
+## Why haven't you licensed your project?
+
+By Richard Fontana.
+
+"Post open-source" has actually been a thing for a while: the term
+describes the widespread trend of not attributing a license to one's
+project.
+
+Berne convention says that copyright is automatic, so this POSS
+software might be implicitly "proprietary".  Why worry?  There is a
+lot of proprietary software already.
+
+Not putting on a license constitutes a statement for some developers.
+
+Some attempts at public-domain dedication:
+
+- [WTFPL](http://www.wtfpl.net/)
+- [Unlicense](http://unlicense.org/)
+- [0-clause BSD](http://landley.net/toybox/license.html)
+- [BOLA](https://blitiri.com.ar/p/bola/)
+- [CC0](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/public-domain/cc0/)
+
+## Handle Conflict, Like a Boss!
+
+By Deb Nicholson.
+
+Conflict mostly comes from missing information, mismatched goals.
+
+Avoidance, accomodation and assertion each have their own issues as
+conflict-handling strategies.
+
+Using historical motivations can help give credit to new ideas.
+
+Hypotheticals such as "What's the worst that could happen?" help
+identify the root issues people will not directly talk about.
+
+No ad hominem. No name-calling. Period.  Beware of [Contempt Culture].
+
+Setting expectations can help enforce a civil tone and constructive
+criticism.
+
+[Contempt Culture]: (https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture).
+
+## The journey of a word: how text ends up on a page
+
+By Simon Cozens.
+
+Very interesting explanations on the lengths Unicode must go to in
+order to turn humanity's sprawling mess of written communication
+methods into rigorous rules that a computer can understand.
+
+Some diacritics can be encoded either with a single code point or a
+vowel plus a combining code point; this is because Unicode intends to
+have one code point for *every character that other encodings have
+ever contained*.
+
+Cozens is publishing a free online book on the subject: [Fonts and
+Layout for Global Scripts].
+
+[Fonts and Layout for Global Scripts]: https://simoncozens.github.io/fonts-and-layout/
+
+## Surviving the Next 30 Years of Free Software
+
+By Karen Sandler.
+
+Is copyright assignment to big organizations (Canonical, FSF?) the
+solution to problems we cannot anticipate?
+
+Wills are tricky: recipients might be taxed on the "monetary value" of
+the "legacy".
+
+Using a trust as a "legal hack": would build a "registry" of free
+software; the trust can map handles to contact information to preserve
+anonymity.
+
+The idea is vaporware for now, since this trust cannot be built
+without debating a lot of finer points.
+
+> The best gift you can give to the people you love is to make sure
+> they're prepared for when you're gone.
+
+## The relationship between openness and democracy
+
+By Pia Waugh.
+
+Openness creates a natural incentive for "doing the right thing".
+
+Some people think shady deals which allow politicians to make huge
+amounts of money from the industry are fair game, since they have to
+get the investments they made during their campaign back.
+
+On "policy-based evidence" as an alternative to evidence-based policy:
+
+> That's rather funny'n'clever'n'witty… Oh shit, you're serious.
+
+How representative and legitimate are elected individuals?  Never mind
+the participation rate, most people vote for (or against) one or two
+things, not the whole program.
+
+> (13:00) Everyone loves to kick public servants; **everyone**.
+
+> (14:30) I was gonna start a cartoon.  And the first thing was gonna
+> be someone saying "I'm surprised that you're working in government,
+> I would've thought you'd disagree with X, Y, Z."  OK.
+>
+> The second panel somone saying to me "I just can't believe you're
+> working in government!  I thought you had *integrity*!  I thought
+> you would disagree with all of these things!"  … *OK*.
+>
+> The third person says "YOU MOTHER-"…  Anyway, goes on a complete
+> tirade, I'll probably get hit on the head.
+>
+> The fourth panel is me running off in the distance.  Into the
+> sunset.  And the three people saying to each other "Why are there no
+> good people in government?"
+
+"Consulting the public" used to be a point on a checklist, not
+intended to yield useful outputs.
+
+## JavaScript is Awe-ful
+
+By Katie McLaughlin.
+
+In JavaScript, functions have to add `var` explicitly to their local
+variable declarations, otherwise they will assign to global variables.
+
+``` javascript
+> [] + []
+""
+> [] + {}
+[object Object]
+> {} + []
+0
+> {} + {}
+NaN
+```
+
+JavaScript is a registered trademark; ECMAScript is the actual,
+*standardised*, **versioned** language.
+
+Some examples of things which can be accomplished without JavaScript:
+<http://youmightnotneedjs.com/>.
+
+Cross-compilers alleviate some of the pain; one has to be careful with
+their prefered language's warts though.
+
+In Ruby, `&&` and `and` do not have the same precedence with respect
+to `not`.
+
+## Data Structures and Algorithms in the 21st Century
+
+By Jacinta Catherine Richardson.
+
+Voronoi diagrams have a lot of applications:
+
+- modeling the capacity of wireless networks
+- robot navigation
+- mouse hoverstate
+
+Fourier transforms help with data compression.  Naively: O(n²); from
+the sixties onward: O(n log(n)).  Nearly Optimal Sparse Fourier
+Transform (2012): O(k log(n)), helps on-the-fly data compression.
+
+Singular Value Decomposition helps with pattern recognition/comparison
+by allowing to express e.g. rotations.
+
+> New stuff!
+
+Evolutionary algorithms (a form of AI/machine learning) to find
+optima:
+
+- a function to tell "is this good enough?"
+
+Genetic algorithms (a form of evolutionary):
+
+- fitness criteria
+- swap information ("breed")
+- random-ish variations
+
+> Setting up the fitness criteria and the initial conditions for
+> genetic algorithms […] is as much art as it is science.
+
+Artificial Immune Systems (90s) is used in computer security.
+
+Swarm algorithms: agents share the value of their findings and
+converge.  Used e.g. to locate cancer; considered for e.g. traveling
+sales person problem, unmanned cars.
+
+Bacterial Foraging Optimization; Shuffled Frog Leaping;
+Teaching-Learning-Based Optimisations.
+
+[Foldit](http://fold.it) is an experiment consisting in making humans
+solve hard problems (e.g. protein folding) through competitive gaming.
+
+Graph isomorphism is *hard*.  Easy to verify, hard to solve. Until a
+week ago: we can now solve them in quasi-polynomial time.
+
+## My personal fight against the modern laptop
+
+By Hamish Coleman.
+
+Ports, durability, keys are getting worse.
+
+Plugging an older keyboard on newer Thinkpads presents issues:
+
+- the motherboard sends in high-voltage current to enable backlight
+- some keys don't work; the firmware must be changed (and then
+  re-encrypted)
+
+Sharing firmware patches is challenging; most end-users have no idea
+what these even are; some of them run Windows and cannot easily use
+the patching tools.
+
+Newer firmwares seem to be signed; this will probably make them harder
+to tweak.
diff --git a/reviews/linux.conf.au-2018.md b/reviews/linux.conf.au-2018.md
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+# linux.conf.au 2018
+
+## Making Technology More Inclusive Through Papercraft and Sound
+
+By Andrew Huang.
+
+I like how the talk goes over a range of cross-domain topics:
+
+- high-level motivations
+
+Improving inclusiveness is necessary to make open-source actually
+empower people; right now a very small subset of the population is
+computer-savvy enough to take advantage of it.  If the situation does
+not improve, a handful of developers will hold a lot of power over
+lots of alienated users, and lawmakers may resort to "preposterous"
+solutions to attempt to regain control, e.g. license bonds for
+software developments.
+
+- Kickstarter campaign management
+- design choices & rationale
+    - "China-ready"
+    - "patience of a child" constraint
+- gory hardware details
+- the end result
+
+## QUIC: Replacing TCP for the Web
+
+By Jana Iyengar.
+
+Starts by introducing impressive application performance improvements,
+although where were those measured?  E.g. rural areas?
+
+Advantage that can already be inferred from the layer view: QUIC needs
+fewer handshakes than TCP+TLS.
+
+Achieves 0-RTT when the server's cryptographic credentials are known.
+
+Supports "stream multiplexing": the upper layer (e.g. HTTP) can
+transfer multiple objects independently in a single connection.
+Losing part of one object does not block the others: retransmission is
+managed at the stream level, not at the connection level.
+
+On top of UDP: allows userspace (Chrome) implementation.
+
+> If you think of layers as a set of functions, things that you want
+> done, UDP is not a transport protocol.
+
+I.e. UDP does not provide reliability, same-order delivery…
+
+Jana was "in the SCTP bandwagon".
+
+They actually have *better performance improvements* for *bigger
+latencies*?  Nice.
+
+> § QUIC improvements by country
+
+👏
+
+(Of course the end goal is probably to make sure regions with poor
+connections do not miss out on the adfest; still, these remain welcome
+technical improvements)
+
+Transport headers are encrypted to prevent "middlebox ossification".
+They left a *single* byte unencrypted (the flags byte): this allowed
+middleboxes to observe that it kinda had the same value on most
+connections, assume that this was a "nominal" value, and block traffic
+when this value differed.
+
+## You Can't Unit Test C, Right?
+
+By Benno Rice.
+
+- Mentions [Check](https://libcheck.github.io/check/) and
+  [Kyua](https://github.com/jmmv/kyua).
+- Factor your boilerplate into libraries, especially the ugly hacks.
+- Keep `main` small so that you don't need to test it so much.
+
+## Changing the world through (fan-)fiction
+
+By Paul Fenwick.
+
+Reading fiction is a convenient way to get us to think through
+concepts we had not considered before.  By re-purposing a familiar
+setting, *fan*fiction lowers the barrier to entry to the writing
+exercise: it makes it easier for the writer to get their point across
+and to reach their audience.
+
+Some recommendations:
+
+- The Last Ringbearer
+- [My Little Pony: Friendship is Optimal]
+- [Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality]
+
+Our media teaches us what is normal.  Hence fiction opens up ways to
+improve the status quo by acquainting us to new ideas.
+
+Another recommendation: Steven Universe.
+
+Mainstream and folklore stories feature a fair amount of unhealthy
+relationships; this is problematic because repeated exposure helps
+normalization[^I find that SMBC is a positive example of this effect:
+it regularly (and, AFAICT, fairly randomly) features gay couples in
+comics where the joke is *not* about homosexuality].
+
+In Japan, doujinshi is considered normal and "adding value to the
+brand", whereas similar things are flagged as "copyright infringement"
+in other countries.
+
+[My Little Pony: Friendship is Optimal]: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/Friendship-is-Optimal
+[Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality]: http://www.hpmor.com/
+
+## Lessons from three years of volunteering to teach students code
+
+By David Tulloh.
+
+Takeways:
+
+1. Volunteering in schools is easy and fun.
+2. We should care about what is taught in schools.
+3. We should get involved and support schools teaching IT.
+
+CSIRO: Australian program to get professional developers to teach in
+schools.
+
+[Pixees](https://pixees.fr/) seems to be a French equivalent.
+
+Tried to move students from "programmers" to "developers" by evoking:
+
+- automated testing
+- version control
+- bug tracking
+- code review
+
+An audience member noted that while programs ala CSIRO are helpful,
+this should be organized at the government policy level.
+
diff --git a/reviews/mailing-lists.md b/reviews/mailing-lists.md
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+++ b/reviews/mailing-lists.md
@@ -0,0 +1,68 @@
+# Emacs
+
+## 2019-01
+
+### [Apropos 54f297904e0c: Temporarily comment out CC Mode from tests which are incompatible with it.][cc-mode/electric-pair]
+
+A thread that feels very representative of the friction between
+"keeping things working as they always did" vs. "simplifying that huge
+lumbering beast of a codebase".  I find [Stefan Monnier's
+intervention][cc-mode/electric-pair-stefan] helpful because it
+captures both sides of the argument quite well:
+
+> >> I understand that there's a transition needed between these two and this
+> >> intermediate state can require more work, but it's important to keep the
+> >> long term goal in mind when designing the current solution.
+> > Whose long term goal?
+>
+> At the very least mine.
+>
+> > My goal, both long and short term, is to keep CC Mode
+> > working properly.
+>
+> That's orthogonal.
+>
+> To give you a similarly general goal, my own goal is to make it so that
+> **any feature which makes sense in many major mode be implemented once and
+> then used in the relevant major modes, rather than being implemented
+> independently for those major modes.**
+>
+> This is both for uniformity between major modes, and because it both
+> simplifies and improves many major modes (which would otherwise either
+> not provide the feature or only in very primitive ways).
+>
+> **And those maintainers like you who did go to the trouble of being early
+> implementers of the feature suffer through the pain of having to adapt
+> their code once the generic version of the feature becomes available.**
+> Sometimes even at the cost of having the new feature working slightly
+> worse in some corner cases.
+>
+> But many of them are quite happy to be able to drop their old code and
+> get rid of that responsibility (i.e. bug reports about regressions can
+> be redirected to Emacs maintainers).
+
+On a non-technical note, this thread allowed RMS to advertise the [GNU
+Kind Communications Guidelines][gnu-kind-communication]:
+
+> To ask "who started it" is to oversimplify.  Often what happens
+> is that a little harshness creeps into a discussion, then people
+> react to that in a way that is a little more harsh.  So nobody
+> "started it" but multiple people exacerbated it.
+>
+> **Thus, part of the effort is, when we feel harshness coming at us,
+> to damp it down rather than hitting back.**
+
+[cc-mode/electric-pair]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-01/msg00360.html
+[cc-mode/electric-pair-stefan]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-01/msg00518.html
+[gnu-kind-communication]: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html
+
+### [Documentation about the completion framework][completion-documentation]
+
+Helpful pointers for whoever wants to dig into completion plumbing.
+Personally, I struggled to get to grips with it when [debugging some
+`icomplete` issue][icomplete-issue], relying on the source for
+information, and giving up while trying to write an automated test
+case.
+
+[completion-documentation]: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2019-01/msg00504.html
+[icomplete-issue]: https://gitlab.com/peniblec/memory-leaks/commit/dcc0c05dc1f6a22645bf9355b72aa44b49776620
diff --git a/reviews/talks.md b/reviews/talks.md
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--- /dev/null
+++ b/reviews/talks.md
@@ -0,0 +1,81 @@
+# Sandi Metz - Nothing is Something
+
+:::: tags
+- OOP
+- Ruby
+::::
+
+Some insightful thoughts on OOP.
+
+Clever examples of message-passing to get rid of conditionals.
+
+Prefer composition with dependency injection to inheritance:
+inheriting to override a method really means that the parent class had
+a default "null" behaviour that can be injected explicitly.
+
+Name the role, make an interface for it, and make classes that
+implement each behaviour (the null one and the specialiazed one).
+This will make it easier to compose specializations (i.e. save you
+from multiple inheritance).
+
+
+# Sandi Metz - Rules
+
+:::: tags
+- OOP
+- Ruby
+::::
+
+Some theory-crafting on rule-following, then the actual rules, which
+amount to
+
+- small classes,
+- tiny methods,
+- few parameters.
+
+At the 16-minute mark, an interesting interaction between Metz and a
+programmer starting to apply these rules: the programmer wonders when
+they will be able to understand the new application "the same way"
+they understood the old one.  I.e. will they ever reach a point where
+they have a complete mental map of every interaction between every
+object, the same way they used to have a complete mental map of the
+old monolithic, sequential application?
+
+Metz's response is that nope, this will never happen; they will "cease
+to care" instead.  In exchange, they will be able to make localized
+changes without worrying about breaking the whole application.
+
+
+# Fred George - The Secret Assumption of Agile
+
+:::: tags
+- Agile
+- OOP
+- programming methods
+- project management
+- training
+::::
+
+Advice on when to refactor:
+
+- *after* design, *before* writing unit tests for the new stuff:
+  prepare ground for the addition to fit right in;
+
+- *after* implementing the new behaviour, *before* integrating.
+
+Goes over the usual code smells taught during the training he gives
+(conditionals, getters & setters, class names ala "Manager", too many
+instance variables)
+
+Mentions a requirement for training "retention": skills must be
+applied within a month after receiving the training, otherwise the
+rationale will be lost.
+
+Questions:
+
+- Does he know of open-source projects that showcase this style of
+  programming?
+    - Smalltalk, some NodeJS libraries
+
+- Does he rely on naming conventions?
+    - Quite a lot.