Rafe Colburn, an engineer who worked at Etsy, writes about software engineering teams, management, tools, and Unix command-line topics.
Commenters cite his Perl versus sed and awk benchmark post, his Vim grammar post, and his guideline on whether managers should code.
I'm reminded of a blog post (https://rc3.org/2015/12/29/answering-the-question-should-managers-code/ , focused on software engineering managers rather than CTOs), which posited this guideline:
"A manager actively avoids creating situations where their coding is necessary for the success of the project."
I agree with Aditya's article. A CTO must be technical for all the reasons stated. I would add another reason to his list: a CTO must be able to challenge the assumptions, plans, and estimates presented to him/her by the engineering team. Doing so requires technical acumen.
This reminds me of a recent discussion where someone mentioned tools over process. (http://rc3.org/2013/07/29/seven-signs-of-dysfunctional-engineering-teams/)
I would say that the 'law' is just subjective manual process, and we desperately need more tools for every-day judgement and decision making.
For example, if there were a computer system that logged all corporate financial transactions including income, then we could automatically tax large corporations, rather than waiting for them to report income through loopholes.
Rafe Colburn from Etsy wrote about this performance oddity:
http://rc3.org/2014/08/28/surprisingly-perl-outperforms-sed-and-awk/
EDIT to manage expectations: the article doesn't explain why, it just provides benchmarks and one commenter made a suggestion about character handling. More insight still welcome :)
Perl is much faster[0], with much more features, with bunch of ready to use libraries, with package manager (CPAN), and similar syntax to awk.
Why you use awk?
[0]: http://rc3.org/2014/08/28/surprisingly-perl-outperforms-sed-and-awk/
You can sign your messages using HMAC[1]. That's what Facebook does when it makes HTTP requests to your application.
[1] http://rc3.org/2011/12/02/using-hmac-to-authenticate-web-service-requests/
vim is a grammar, a true grammar, once you learn that, it all makes sense.
http://rc3.org/2012/05/12/the-grammar-of-vim/