A ship’s markings may look like hieroglyphs, but to industry insiders they tell an important story. By Erin Van Rheenen .

Reddit user FiletOfFish1066 just got fired from his programming job after automating his work for 6 years, he even forgot how to code.

From Neolithic tablets containing the oldest known system of writing, to a series of letters scrawled on the back of a dead man’s book, some of the most legendary undeciphered codes and texts remain a challenge for even the world’s best cryptographers, code breakers, and linguists.

A didactic, animated, exposition of algorithm

The last of the 29 Navajos who developed a code that stumped the Japanese during World War II has died. Chester Nez, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, died Wednesday morning of kidney failure, said Judy Avila, who helped Nez write his memoirs. He was 93.

As software developers we put a lot of focus on simplicity. And rightly so, because making code readable and understandable keeps it from becoming a maintenance nightmare. Simplicity is often confused though with how many lines of code there are.