read_list
List of texts / podcast that caught my attention this year (2024 edition).
- FEB 2024
- Mastering Programming - by Kent Beck
- Why you should never retire
- Where are Europe’s most expensive cities for renters?
- After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
- SE Radio 604: Karl Wiegers and Candase Hokanson on Software Requirements Essentials – Software Engineering Radio
- Gemini and Google’s Culture – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- Change statusline color to show insert or normal mode
- The Science of Learning to Code Debunking Myths and Exploring the Science - CoRecursive Podcast
- A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie Nardi - Future of Coding - Omny.fm
- MAR 2024
- The Perils of Audience Capture - by Gurwinder - The Prism
- What Monks Know about Focus - by Joel J Miller
- Rise of Worse Is Better
- The subprocess Module: Wrapping Programs With Python – Real Python
- Vim Checkbox Toggle - VimTricks
- How to replace a character by a newline in Vim - Stack Overflow
- Why we 💚 Vim Changelog Interviews #450
- Vim round table discussion with Drew Neil, Tim Pope, and Yehuda Katz Changelog Interviews #56
- How to Make ‘Vim Editor’ as Bash-IDE in Linux
- Slashing Data Transfer Costs in AWS by 99% · Bits and Cloud
- Summarizing ‘The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations’
- BashFAQ/031 - Greg’s Wiki
- Cut and Download Youtube Videos
- Advent of Computing: Episode 96 - What Exactly IS A Database? Part I
- Martin Luther: The Man Who Changed The World - YouTube
- The rise of the remote husband
- Never Wish For Less Time - The Daily Dad
- John Mayer New Rule in Life Never
- He had a routine…
- Fareed Zakaria on the Age of Revolutions, the Power of Ideas, and the Rewards of Intellectual Curiosity Ep. 208
- What does connection reset by peer mean
- Opinion
- Anger is eliminated with the disposal of a paper written because of provocation
- Jonathan Haidt on Adjusting to Smartphones and Social Media Ep. 209
- APR 2024
- Gemini 1.5 and Google’s Nature – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- media.vimcasts.org/videos/39/profiling.m4v
- Tips on Adding JSON Output to Your CLI App - Brazil’s Blog
- Foreword to The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
- Bringing the Unix Philosophy to the 21st Century - Brazil’s Blog
- This Conversation made me a Better Editor - Ezra Klein Show
- Laws of Software Evolution
- Keynote by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at 2024 SIEPR Economic Summit
- Agile Otter Blog: Programming Is Mostly Thinking
- Other people’s problems
- Elephant in the Room - Future of Coding - Omny.fm
- Cal Newport’s Planning System In Detail - YouTube
- Albín Polášek – Wikipedie
- Advanced Vim registers
- python - How to copy files - Stack Overflow
- vim - Redefine tab as 4 spaces - Stack Overflow
- Chapter I: The birth of Parquet
- The defensive arrogance of TL;DR
- Professional corner-cutting : Havoc’s Blog
- Brad DeLong on Intellectual and Technical Progress Ep. 172
- Quality First and Other Advice
- A simple illustration of the benefits of feminization - Marginal REVOLUTION
- How I quadrupled my typing speed. Using deliberate practice to improve…
- What I think about when I edit — Eva Parish
- Senior Engineer Fatigue - Blog
- Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop? : Tulleken, Chris van: Amazon.co.uk: Books
- Early websites.
- The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website
- Start all of your commands with a comma
- Comparing buffers with vimdiff
- Where DOESN’T curl run with curl BDFL Daniel Stenberg Changelog & Friends #49
- Marcus’ Blog - Programming Advice to Younger Self
- Use A Work Journal To Recover Focus Faster And Clarify Your Thoughts
- Docs as Code — Write the Docs
- A Git story: Not so fun this time
- The changes in vibes - why did they happen? - Marginal REVOLUTION
- Display the Search Count in Vim’s Status Bar — Nick Janetakis
- We’re Not Balanced Right - The Daily Dad
- AUG 2024
- Crashes and Competition – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- The Product Analytics Market: Overview and Deep Dive
- A gambler’s guide to giving talks - by Benn Stancil
- OODA and You - Robert Greene
- Practices of Reliable Software Design
- Lidl’s Cloud Gambit: Europe’s Shift to Sovereign Computing
- The Most Important Question of Your Life
- Evolving JavaScript with Douglas Crockford - The Transcript
- Eric S. Raymond - Wikipedia
- SEP 2024
- Getting away with it - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack
- David Chang on the long, hard, stupid way – Herbert Lui
- The Rise of Open Source Time Series Databases
- Words on Founder Mode – Rands in Repose
- Borg, Omega and Kubernetes
- It’s not always DNS with Paul Vixie contributor to DNS protocol design Changelog Interviews #581
- The Data Stack Show-70: The Difference Between Data Lakes and Data Warehouses with Vinoth Chandar of Apache Hudi
- The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source-It’s not always DNS Interview
- TDSS 103: Everyone Is Invited to the Data Lakehouse - YouTube
- It’s hard to write code for computers, but it’s even harder to write code for humans · Erik Bernhardsson
- Size of top-level domain TLD servers? Especially .com? - Server Fault
- Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 featuring Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js & Deno Changelog Interviews #610
- Years of Queries – Communications of the ACM
- Advent of Computing: Episode 97 - What Exactly IS A Database? Part II
- 26 Exploring the Various Gateways in AWS
- The Untold Story of SQLite With Richard Hipp - CoRecursive Podcast
- Elon Dreams and Bitter Lessons – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- Is ArgoCd an alternative to jenkins? : r/devops
- OCT 2024
- Advent of Computing: Episode 97 - What Exactly IS A Database? Part II
- Lessons Learnt From Supporting Modern Data Lake Formats at Snowplow - YouTube
- The Primeagen on Developer
- Focus on decisions, not tasks
- Informix - Wikipedia
- How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner - DaedTech
- GitOps - Operations by Pull Request [B] - Alexis Richardson, Weaveworks & William Denniss, Google - YouTube
- Warren Buffett’s GEICO repatriates work from the cloud
- the essence of love is… annoyance? - by Ava
- Lessons From 150 Million Podcast Downloads - RyanHoliday.net
- NOV 2024
- Learning to learn
- Blog Writing for Developers
- Show HN: Scooter – Interactive find and replace in the terminal
- David Beazley - Python Concurrency From the Ground Up: LIVE! - PyCon 2015 - YouTube
- Good software development habits
- Embedded databases 1: The harmony of DuckDB, KùzuDB and LanceDB
- April King — Handling Cookies is a Minefield
- On the Toll of Being a Disruptor
- localfirst.fm - A podcast about local-first software development.
- Poisoning the day
- bfrg/vim-jqplay: Run jq interactively in Vim
- Sketch - Ensō Coffeeshop Mode · Untested
- xo/usql: Universal command-line interface for SQL databases
- Embedded databases 1: The harmony of DuckDB, KùzuDB and LanceDB
- Comments - War, Deficits, and the Russian Economy: An Uphill Battle to Nowhere
FEB 2024
Mastering Programming - by Kent Beck
- https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/mastering-programming
- Returning to the chronicling of my readings. The insistence on analysis as part of growth is also in SICP. Here, it is about the problem as well as about the time. Slicing seems to be the most important skill masters possess. As well as singletasking. Minimalism. Elegance. There are many words for the same thing.
The theme here is scaling your brain. The journeyman learns to solve bigger problems by solving more problems at once. The master learns to solve even bigger problems than that by solving fewer problems at once. Part of the wisdom is subdividing so that integrating the separate solutions will be a smaller problem than just solving them together.
Why you should never retire
- https://www.economist.com/business/2024/01/25/why-you-should-never-retire
- exactly right; the only problem is that you may develop a disability and one should think about that option. Surely no way I would ever enter the state social system to be taken care of. The horror stories make me cry.
In an episode of “The Sopranos”, a popular television series which started airing in the 1990s, a gangster tells Tony, from the titular family, that he wants to retire. “What are you, a hockey player?” Tony snaps back. Non-fictional non-criminals who are considering an end to their working lives need not worry about broken fingers or other bodily harm. But they must still contend with other potentially painful losses: of income, purpose or, most poignantly, relevance. Some simply won’t quit. Giorgio Armani refuses to relinquish his role as chief executive of his fashion house at the age of 89. Being Italy’s second-richest man has not dampened his work ethic. Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s sidekick at Berkshire Hathaway, worked for the investment powerhouse until he died late last year at the age of 99. Mr Buffett himself is going strong at 93.
Where are Europe’s most expensive cities for renters?
After 14 years in the industry, I still find programming difficult
- https://www.piglei.com/articles/en-programming-is-still-hard-after-14-years/
- The note on creation and the reference to the Pragmatic Programmer’s big picture/cathedral view of the world is important.
While there are many benefits to “creating”, and programmers have plenty of opportunities to engage in it, many often lack the awareness of being a “creator.” This is similar to the widely told story about a philosopher who asked bricklayers what they were doing. Some were clearly aware they were building a cathedral, while others thought they were merely laying bricks. Many programmers are like the latter, seeing only the bricks, not the cathedral.
SE Radio 604: Karl Wiegers and Candase Hokanson on Software Requirements Essentials – Software Engineering Radio
- https://se-radio.net/2024/02/se-radio-604-karl-wiegers-and-candase-hokanson-on-software-requirements-essentials/
- Requirement eliciting is an interesting concept.
The first thing we have to do regarding requirements is to get some, and people often talk about gathering requirements, but that’s a little restrictive. The term requirements elicitation is broader and more accurate. I mean, of course there’s an aspect of gathering or collecting requirements out of people’s brains and documents and existing products and all other sources, but elicitation goes beyond that because there’s also a lot of discovery and invention that takes place during requirements elicitation. So you can’t just ask people what their requirements are and expect to get a useful or very complete answer. The business analyst is really a guide, or the requirements engineer, if we’re being optimistic, they’re a guide that leads this requirements exploration. And people also need to understand that elicitation, like the rest of the stuff that we’re talking about in this general broad category of requirements development, that’s an incremental and iterative process. Y
Gemini and Google’s Culture – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- https://stratechery.com/2024/gemini-and-googles-culture/
- Critical suggestion that Google must learn from Microsoft and undergo culture change which usually means leadership change.
Those of us who don’t want to tell everyone else what to think, do, paradoxically, need to say so.
Change statusline color to show insert or normal mode
- https://vim.fandom.com/wiki/Change_statusline_color_to_show_insert_or_normal_mode
- Great tip! No need to move your eyes to check what mode you are in ANYMORE
The Science of Learning to Code Debunking Myths and Exploring the Science - CoRecursive Podcast
- https://corecursive.com/the-science-of-learning-to-code/
- The science behind tutoring and mentoring helps me understand my son’s (under)perforamce in some extra-curricular classes he’s been taking and I am moving to 121 instructions. Also, “Camel has 2 humps” is rather an interesting story.
- Adam: So there’s this guy, Benjamin Bloom. He’s a famous educational psychologist, not a computer programmer at all, but he did an experiment that shocked the world. Shocked the world of education that is. I’m not sure how much anyone else cared. But it became known as the Two Sigma problem.
- So picture it, it’s Chicago in the 1980s, and Bloom and his team of grad students have set up an experiment with students at different Chicago public schools. They took a group of average students randomly selected, and they had them learn a curriculum through conventional teaching methods, which is like lecturing, testing, some group work, et cetera. Standard classroom stuff.
- Another randomly selected group from the same pool of students learned the exact same curriculum, but with one-on-one tutoring. Each student worked through problems on their own, but with a tutor who gave them immediate feedback and then advanced them to the next problem set when they had demonstrated that they had mastered that concept. The results, the students with tutoring vastly outperformed the others by two standard deviations, hence Two Sigma.
A Small Matter of Programming by Bonnie Nardi - Future of Coding - Omny.fm
- https://omny.fm/shows/future-of-coding/a-small-matter-of-programming-by-bonnie-nardi
- Watching my son having a same relationship to computers as I have to electricity, i.e. reified taken for granted stuff, I am skeptical about end user programming . It’s fight-club hacker’s club where this goes. Besides, part of the job description.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_matter_of_programming
- https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262140539/
MAR 2024
The Perils of Audience Capture - by Gurwinder - The Prism
- https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture
- Cal Newport talked about audience capture in his interview with Tim Ferris in regards to the leftization of NYT as they switched to subscription-based model. This essay the first place that introduced me to the concept.
What Monks Know about Focus - by Joel J Miller
- https://www.millersbookreview.com/p/jamie-kreiner-how-to-focus
- Adventure described is more interesting than proposed methods.
In his twenties, he and his friend Germanus joined a monastery in Bethlehem. The two became fast friends, “inseparable bunkmates,” of such shared intensity and interest “everyone remarked on the equality of our companionship and our sense of purpose. They said that we were one mind and soul in two bodies.” The pair wanted to know all the ins and outs of their discipline and decided to travel beyond their local confines to hear from reputed monastic masters. So, for the next decade and a half they traveled the Nile Delta, interviewing the men known as the Desert Fathers, those in monasteries as well as hermits living on their own.
Rise of Worse Is Better
- https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
- An example when content and idea wins over clarity and form. The difference between design styles that the essay opens with is really not clear. One wishes for a diff editor. Yet, one of the most famous piece of writings in the field. And cool, too.
Let me start out by retelling a story that shows that the MIT/New-Jersey distinction is valid and that proponents of each philosophy actually believe their philosophy is better. Two famous people, one from MIT and another from Berkeley (but working on Unix) once met to discuss operating system issues. The person from MIT was knowledgeable about ITS (the MIT AI Lab operating system) and had been reading the Unix sources. He was interested in how Unix solved the PC loser-ing problem. The PC loser-ing problem occurs when a user program invokes a system routine to perform a lengthy operation that might have significant state, such as IO buffers. If an interrupt occurs during the operation, the state of the user program must be saved. Because the invocation of the system routine is usually a single instruction, the PC of the user program does not adequately capture the state of the process. The system routine must either back out or press forward. The right thing is to back out and restore the user program PC to the instruction that invoked the system routine so that resumption of the user program after the interrupt, for example, re-enters the system routine. It is called PC loser-ing because the PC is being coerced into loser mode, where loser is the affectionate name for user at MIT. The MIT guy did not see any code that handled this case and asked the New Jersey guy how the problem was handled. The New Jersey guy said that the Unix folks were aware of the problem, but the solution was for the system routine to always finish, but sometimes an error code would be returned that signaled that the system routine had failed to complete its action. A correct user program, then, had to check the error code to determine whether to simply try the system routine again. The MIT guy did not like this solution because it was not the right thing. The New Jersey guy said that the Unix solution was right because the design philosophy of Unix was simplicity and that the right thing was too complex. Besides, programmers could easily insert this extra test and loop. The MIT guy pointed out that the implementation was simple but the interface to the functionality was complex. The New Jersey guy said that the right tradeoff has been selected in Unix – namely, implementation simplicity was more important than interface simplicity. The MIT guy then muttered that sometimes it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, but the New Jersey guy didn’t understand (I’m not sure I do either).
The subprocess Module: Wrapping Programs With Python – Real Python
Vim Checkbox Toggle - VimTricks
- https://vimtricks.com/p/vim-checkbox-toggle/
- Optimizing workflows with checklists
How to replace a character by a newline in Vim - Stack Overflow
Why we 💚 Vim (Changelog Interviews #450)
- https://changelog.com/podcast/450
- Much better than 2011 episode, you see how the podcast progressed. Preparaed. Dramarturgy working. Even bad sides of vim mentioned.
Vim round table discussion with Drew Neil, Tim Pope, and Yehuda Katz (Changelog Interviews #56)
- https://changelog.com/podcast/56
- As mentioned above, the worse of the two Changelog episodes. However Drew Neil is still great and Tim Pope makes a mysterious short apppearane.
How to Make ‘Vim Editor’ as Bash-IDE in Linux
Slashing Data Transfer Costs in AWS by 99% · Bits and Cloud
Summarizing ‘The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations’
- https://kevinczarzasty.medium.com/summarizing-the-devops-handbook-how-to-create-world-class-agility-reliability-and-security-in-86d8357d9995
- Accompanying podcast about the technical aspects of flow principle of devops.
BashFAQ/031 - Greg’s Wiki
Cut and Download Youtube Videos
- https://ytcutter.cc/
- Great. Sometimes I make a short clip and send to my lovely wife via imessage.
Advent of Computing: Episode 96 - What Exactly IS A Database? Part I
- https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/episode-96-what-exactly-is-a-database-part-i
- Interesting comparisons of early DB with Lisp. Thoughts on storage, files, and problems that it brings.
Martin Luther: The Man Who Changed The World - YouTube
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCAsmzkaErg&t=345s
- What a great into to Reformation
The rise of the remote husband
- https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/04/04/the-rise-of-the-remote-husband
- Exactly my case. Well spotted.
Never Wish For Less Time - The Daily Dad
- https://dailydad.com/never-wish-for-less-time/
- Same insigt during meditative practice and reading a bit of Heidegger. Interesting.
I have a new rule in my life,” John Mayer said during a recent show, “and the rule is: Never wish for less time. Waiting for things to be over is just wishing for less time. Waiting for this to be over to get to the next thing—that’s just wishing for less time.” Wishing for less time with our kids, that’s what we’re doing. Wishing for their childhood to be over, that’s what we’re doing. “I’ve realized,” he adds, “Everything you love and hate leaves at the same speed: Done. Done. Done. The thing you hate that you have to do tomorrow will be over before you know it, and the thing you’re looking forward to tomorrow will be over before you know it…So wherever you go, just make a home right there and do that thing…Wherever you are, go, ‘this is where it’s all at right now.’ I’ve been having the time of my life because I figured that out.”
John Mayer New Rule in Life Never
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQDaYoREoGs&ab_channel=itsmemiaq
- Well said, once again.
He had a routine…
which is, he’d get up about 6:00 a.m. He’d go down to the basement of his townhouse, and at 6:30, he would start writing or working on whatever his next big research project was. He’d do that, uninterrupted, for three hours at least, sometimes four. Then, at about 9:30, 10:00, he would take the subway to Harvard. His point was, you got to start the day by doing the important work of academia, which is producing knowledge. All the rest of it — teaching, committee meetings, all that — you can do later. He was so disciplined about that, that every five years or so, he put out another major piece of work, another major book. I looked at that, and I said to myself, I do not have the self-discipline to perform at that level. I need to go into something that has deadlines, that has structure, that has more feedback because, as you know well, Tyler, there’s a very lonely aspect to being an academic. There’s a lot of fun, and there’s lots of interesting things, but a lot of it is just sitting by yourself
Fareed Zakaria on the Age of Revolutions, the Power of Ideas, and the Rewards of Intellectual Curiosity (Ep. 208)
- https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/fareed-zakaria/
- On priorities and asset building. Professionalism.
Sam Huntington was quite an extraordinary character, probably the most important social scientist in the second half of the 20th century. Huge contributions to several fields of political science. He lived next to me. Me, obviously in a tiny graduate student apartment, but he in a townhouse on Beacon Hill. I would sometimes talk to him. We’d have coffee in the mornings. He had a routine, which is, he’d get up about 6:00 a.m. He’d go down to the basement of his townhouse, and at 6:30, he would start writing or working on whatever his next big research project was. He’d do that, uninterrupted, for three hours at least, sometimes four. Then, at about 9:30, 10:00, he would take the subway to Harvard. His point was, you got to start the day by doing the important work of academia, which is producing knowledge. All the rest of it — teaching, committee meetings, all that — you can do later. He was so disciplined about that, that every five years or so, he put out another major piece of work, another major book.
What does connection reset by peer mean
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1434451/what-does-connection-reset-by-peer-mean
“Connection reset by peer” is the TCP/IP equivalent of slamming the phone back on the hook. It’s more polite than merely not replying, leaving one hanging. But it’s not the FIN-ACK expected of the truly polite TCP/IP converseur.
Opinion
- https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/29/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-john-ganz.html
- Not sure. I am in Slovakia. Feel the middle-finger politics is very active here, too. But from the left.
Anger is eliminated with the disposal of a paper written because of provocation
- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-57916-z
- A bit ezoteric, but perhaps a cool life hack.
Anger suppression is important in our daily life, as its failure can sometimes lead to the breaking down of relationships in families. Thus, effective strategies to suppress or neutralise anger have been examined. This study shows that physical disposal of a piece of paper containing one’s written thoughts on the cause of a provocative event neutralises anger, while holding the paper did not.
Jonathan Haidt on Adjusting to Smartphones and Social Media (Ep. 209)
- https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jonathan-haidt-anxious-generation/
- Sociologist talking about natural needs of humans. Finally someone. Human children play a lot. All mammal children do. They have to play to wire up their brains. They have to do that a lot, and we all did that. Everyone over 40 did that. We did that during a crime wave, when there were flashers and perverts and drunk drivers. We didn’t use to lock them up. Now we do. It’s gotten much safer since the ’90s. We went out when life had some danger in it. We played and played and played. We loved TV. We probably watched two or three hours a day of that, but we had a lot of time unsupervised to play.
The problem with screens is that they’re so attractive. They came in, the whole virtual world opened up just as we were freaking out about child abduction in the ’80s and ’90s. The main argument in the book is that we have taken the healthy, normal, play-based childhood that all mammals need, and we swapped it out and gave them a phone-based childhood, once we gave them an iPhone.
The issue isn’t like, “Oh, you have a screen. Let’s have AI get rid of the screen.” No. The issue is, you are on this thing, which we can call an experience blocker. A phone is an experience blocker. That means you spend a lot less time talking to other people, in the presence of other people. You’re not with your friends. You are sleeping less. You’re out in nature less. You have less of almost everything. You don’t read books. You have no time for anything else.
APR 2024
Gemini 1.5 and Google’s Nature – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- https://stratechery.com/2024/gemini-1-5-and-googles-nature/
- Lots of attention on GCP also at my work. Ben argues that AI will push Google away from search as it cloud has a different business model. Let’s see said the zen master.
media.vimcasts.org/videos/39/profiling.m4v
- http://media.vimcasts.org/videos/39/profiling.m4v
- Right when my .vimrc started to take ages to save!
Tips on Adding JSON Output to Your CLI App - Brazil’s Blog
- https://blog.kellybrazil.com/2021/12/03/tips-on-adding-json-output-to-your-cli-app/
- JSON output used the most with AWS CLI. +1 A couple of years ago I wrote a somewhat controversial article on the topic of Bringing the Unix Philosophy to the 21st Century by adding a JSON output option to CLI tools. This allows easier parsing in scripts by using JSON parsing tools like jq, jello, jp, etc. without arcane awk, sed, cut, tr, reverse, etc. incantations.
It was controversial because there seem to be a lot of folks who don’t think writing bespoke parsers for each task is a big deal. Others think JSON is evil.
Foreword to The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
- https://worrydream.com/HammingForeword/
- Linking to https://corecursive.com/brian-kernighan-unix-bell-labs1/#thinking-great-thoughts-with-richard-hamming Hamming’s own career reflects this contradiction. He was employed essentially as a kind of internal mathematical consultant; he spent his days helping other people with their problems, often problems of a practical and mundane nature. Rather than begrudging this work, he saw it as the “interaction with harsh reality” necessary to keep his head out of the clouds, and at best, the continuous production of “micro-Nobel Prizes.” And most critically, all of his “great” work, his many celebrated inventions, grew directly out of these problems he was solving for other people.
Throughout, Hamming insisted on an open door, lunched with anyone he could learn from or argue with, stormed in and out of colleagues’ offices, and otherwise made indisputable the social dimensions of advancing a field.
Bringing the Unix Philosophy to the 21st Century - Brazil’s Blog
- https://blog.kellybrazil.com/2019/11/26/bringing-the-unix-philosophy-to-the-21st-century/
- Ambitious writing supported by heaps of engineering effort. +1 The Unix philosophy of using compact expert tools that do one thing well and pipelining them together to manipulate data is a great idea and has worked well for the past few decades. This philosophy was outlined in the 1978 Foreward to the Bell System Technical Journal describing the UNIX Time-Sharing System
This Conversation made me a Better Editor - Ezra Klein Show
- https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-adam-moss.html
- The relevance and concept of editting got to me in the best of moments. It is the first time I am co-authoring something with my wife and I am getting early feedback of her great editting talent. Hurts a bit and I value that tremendously.
Laws of Software Evolution
- https://two-wrongs.com/laws-of-software-evolution
- Sober voice against woke, it seems. Andrew Kelly has written a thoughtful article on why we can’t have nice software. He acknowledges that software often gets continuous maintenance, and notes that this is curious, since “bits don’t actually rot” on their own, i.e. software should not get worse just by existing. He searches for another explanation for this maintenance effort, and settles on it being a manufactured demand. Andrew Kelly says continuous maintenance is a corporate conspiracy where in order to make profits companies make changes that are not necessary.
Keynote by NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang at 2024 SIEPR Economic Summit
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEg8cOx7UZk
- The amount of dry humor is amazing.
Agile Otter Blog: Programming Is Mostly Thinking
Other people’s problems
- https://seths.blog/2024/04/other-peoples-problems/zz It’s surprisingly easy to be generous and find solutions to our friend’s problems. Much easier than it is to do it for ourselves. Why? There are two useful reasons, I think. FIRST, because we’re unaware of all the real and imaginary boundaries our friends have set up. If it were easy to solve the problem, they probably would have. But they’re making it hard because they have decided that there are people or systems that aren’t worth challenging.
Elephant in the Room - Future of Coding - Omny.fm
- https://omny.fm/shows/future-of-coding/elephant-in-the-room
- Meet Bret Victor’s Demoes if you have not. Amazing.
Cal Newport’s Planning System (In Detail) - YouTube
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FipKTzkTD4
- Cal Newport staying faithful to some of his college practices like shutdown ritual. Enjoyable!
Albín Polášek – Wikipedie
Advanced Vim registers
- https://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/advanced-vim-registers/
- Vim Science +1
python - How to copy files - Stack Overflow
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/123198/how-to-copy-files
- After all this time, finally getting to shutil built-in module
vim - Redefine tab as 4 spaces - Stack Overflow
- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1878974/redefine-tab-as-4-spaces
- combined with vimcast http://vimcasts.org/episodes/show-invisibles/ on a similar subject
Chapter I: The birth of Parquet
- https://sympathetic.ink/2024/01/24/Chapter-1-The-birth-of-Parquet.html
- A bit more complex then JSON, a bit less relevant, still a big deal.
The defensive arrogance of TL;DR
- https://seths.blog/2024/05/the-defensive-arrogance-of-tldr/
- TL;DR is defensive. Not simply because it defends our time, but because it defends us from change and from lived experience. A joke isn’t funny because it has a punchline. It’s funny because something happens to us as the joke unfolds, and the punch line is simply a punctuation of that experience.
Professional corner-cutting : Havoc’s Blog
Brad DeLong on Intellectual and Technical Progress (Ep. 172)
- https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/brad-delong/
- Modernism still with us.
Quality First and Other Advice
A simple illustration of the benefits of feminization - Marginal REVOLUTION
How I quadrupled my typing speed. Using deliberate practice to improve…
What I think about when I edit — Eva Parish
- https://evaparish.com/blog/how-i-edit
- Many gems.
Senior Engineer Fatigue - Blog
Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food … and Why Can’t We Stop? : Tulleken, Chris van: Amazon.co.uk: Books
Early websites.
In the beginning, website HTML was crafted by hand. Your average personal — or corporate — website might consist of hand-edited HTML subsequently uploaded, probably via FTP, to a web server which knew only how to serve static files. Since web pages in a set often include shared elements like headers and footers, maintaining this was obviously troublesome. I have no doubt each and every person charged with maintaining such a website found their own solutions. Maybe they wrote simple Perl scripts to generate pages with common headers. If they weren’t programmers, maybe they used some tool like Frontpage, Dreamweaver or Hotdog that (possibly) offered some useful functionality in this regard. Or maybe they just stuck it out and edited every page manually when they wanted to change the header or footer. You might think that sounds nuts, but I’m fairly sure it was quite common. At some point “Server Side Includes” (SSI) came along, offering extremely basic file inclusion functionality to allow common headers and footers. CGI was developed, allowing web pages to be produced from dynamic scripts. While groundbreaking for enabling dynamic web applications, I got the impression most ordinary websites did not make use of it for serving pages. Many web servers required or at least recommended CGI scripts to be placed in a special cgi-bin directory, making URLs rather cumbersome. One major CGI application was the blogging platform Movable Type, which featured a CGI and Perl-based administration webapp which automatically regenerated static files from a database whenever changes were made.
The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website
Start all of your commands with a comma
Comparing buffers with vimdiff
Where DOESN’T curl run with curl BDFL Daniel Stenberg (Changelog & Friends #49)
Marcus’ Blog - Programming Advice to Younger Self
Use A Work Journal To Recover Focus Faster And Clarify Your Thoughts
Docs as Code — Write the Docs
A Git story: Not so fun this time
The changes in vibes - why did they happen? - Marginal REVOLUTION
Display the Search Count in Vim’s Status Bar — Nick Janetakis
We’re Not Balanced Right - The Daily Dad
AUG 2024
Crashes and Competition – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- https://stratechery.com/2024/crashes-and-competition/
The Product Analytics Market: Overview and Deep Dive
- https://www.news.aakashg.com/p/product-analytics-market
A gambler’s guide to giving talks - by Benn Stancil
OODA and You - Robert Greene
Practices of Reliable Software Design
Lidl’s Cloud Gambit: Europe’s Shift to Sovereign Computing
The Most Important Question of Your Life
Evolving JavaScript with Douglas Crockford - The Transcript
- https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/SED1722-Douglas-Crockford.txt ne day, I was out bicycling and I had this realization that JavaScript had lambdas in it, which nobody ever told us that it had that, and it doesn’t really say so in the standard, but you put it together and that completely changed my understanding of the language. That this is really a functional language with dynamic objects. We’ve never seen a language like this. It’s brilliant that it’s incredibly expressive and wonderful, and that changed my life. That epiphany put me down this road, which has served me really well.
Eric S. Raymond - Wikipedia
SEP 2024
Getting away with it - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack
David Chang on the long, hard, stupid way – Herbert Lui
The Rise of Open Source Time Series Databases
Words on Founder Mode – Rands in Repose
Borg, Omega and Kubernetes
It’s not always DNS with Paul Vixie (contributor to DNS protocol design) (Changelog Interviews #581)
The Data Stack Show-70: The Difference Between Data Lakes and Data Warehouses with Vinoth Chandar of Apache Hudi
The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source-It’s not always DNS (Interview)
TDSS 103: Everyone Is Invited to the Data Lakehouse - YouTube
It’s hard to write code for computers, but it’s even harder to write code for humans · Erik Bernhardsson
Size of top-level domain (TLD) servers? Especially .com? - Server Fault
Leveling up JavaScript with Deno 2 featuring Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js & Deno (Changelog Interviews #610)
- https://changelog.com/podcast/610 And I think this idea of striving for simplicity is – well, let’s put it this way. JavaScript I continue to believe is not like other programming languages. It is something like the default programming language, because so much of human infrastructure is built on the web. And because JavaScript is like HTTP or CSS or HTML, it is one of the protocols of the web. It has a future that you can’t necessarily say about Swift. Lots of people use Swift, a lot of infrastructure is built on Swift, but it’s not like JavaScript. JavaScript will be here five years from now, if not 10, if not 20, if not forever. This may be really deeply embedded in humanity at this point.
50 Years of Queries – Communications of the ACM
- https://cacm.acm.org/research/50-years-of-queries/ Wonderful essay on history of SQL. Similar pattern to other great tech. Academic (HTTP) simplification (JSON/REST) of previous complex tech (Navigational DBs).
Advent of Computing: Episode 97 - What Exactly IS A Database? Part II
(26) Exploring the Various Gateways in AWS
The Untold Story of SQLite With Richard Hipp - CoRecursive Podcast
Elon Dreams and Bitter Lessons – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- https://stratechery.com/2024/elon-dreams-and-bitter-lessons/ Another really bad prediction. Easy to laugh to the past though. Survivorship bias?
Is ArgoCd an alternative to jenkins? : r/devops
OCT 2024
Advent of Computing: Episode 97 - What Exactly IS A Database? Part II
Lessons Learnt From Supporting Modern Data Lake Formats at Snowplow - YouTube
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QScMnc7uGDw&ab_channel=BigDataLDN My Colleague Jordan at Big Data London. Great intro to lakehouse and some experience sharing.
The Primeagen on Developer
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96VlfN7ViyE&ab_channel=Laravel Always prefer Uncle Bob over Primagean. But understand the value of his energy in the year when 80% of us are reported not happy in their job (unhappy or complatenc) as per Stack Overflow Survey 2024.
Focus on decisions, not tasks
- https://technicalwriting.dev/strategy/decisions.html Known to me. Mainly for handling alerts. Some are customer/workspace specific. How to inform about context?
Informix - Wikipedia
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informix Played a role in the creation of SQLlite, as described in Corecursive Podcast with SQLlite creator.
How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner - DaedTech
- https://daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner/ There’s nothing you can do to improve as long as you keep bowling like that. You’ve maxed out. If you want to get better, you’re going to have to learn to bowl properly.
You need a different ball, a different style of throwing it, and you need to put your fingers in it like a big boy. And the worst part is that you’re going to get way worse before you get better, and it will be a good bit of time before you get back to and surpass your current average.
GitOps - Operations by Pull Request [B] - Alexis Richardson, Weaveworks & William Denniss, Google - YouTube
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSqE2RqctNs&ab_channel=CNCF%5BCloudNativeComputingFoundation%5D important talk
Warren Buffett’s GEICO repatriates work from the cloud
- https://www.thestack.technology/warren-buffetts-geico-repatriates-work-from-the-cloud-continues-ambitious-infrastructure-overhaul/ The trend of big players going away from the cloud seems to be emerging.
the essence of love is… annoyance? - by Ava
- https://www.avabear.xyz/p/the-essence-of-love-is-annoyance The annoyance VS boredom relationship test is awesome it its honesty.
29 Lessons From 150 Million Podcast Downloads - RyanHoliday.net
- https://ryanholiday.net/29-lessons-from-150-million-podcast-downloads/ Find your reps. Lacrosse legend Paul Rabil had a coach tell him that the key to making it in lacrosse was simple: take one hundred shots a day. The caveat? Holidays, bad weather, sickness–none of that can get in the way. “You can’t miss a day,” the coach said. And that’s what Paul did. Every single day from high school through his professional career–for twenty years. Everywhere he went, he found a wall to throw against, a goal to shoot on. One hundred shots a day, no exception.
I like that idea because it translates to almost everything in life. Whatever sport, business, or field you’re in: figure out what your reps are. Something you can commit to, every single day, that’s completely in your control. The key is: never miss a day. (Listen to the full interview with Paul here, and check out his book The Way of the Champion.)
Be an ‘everyday guy’. Buzz Williams, the basketball coach for Texas A&M, brought up a similar point. He talked about the idea of being an everyday guy: “Whatever it is that you’re trying to do, are you tough enough to do that every day?” he asks. “If you’re basing it on talent, well at some point in time it might prevail, but not always. And so if you remove talent, then it comes down to consistency, discipline, and how you are spending your time.”
NOV 2024
Learning to learn
- https://kevin.the.li/posts/learning-to-learn/ Build a personal curriculum to become an expert and avoid the trap of the expert beginner.
Blog Writing for Developers
Show HN: Scooter – Interactive find and replace in the terminal
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42148543 Not Sure If I have a usecase, but a well received and good looking simple find&replace tool, sed replacement.
David Beazley - Python Concurrency From the Ground Up: LIVE! - PyCon 2015 - YouTube
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCs5OvhV9S4&ab_channel=PyCon2015 Curioud aboud David Baezley’s stuff for a while now. Bookmarking a viral conference talk to watch for later. Live Coding Demo, takes some courage todo.
Good software development habits
- https://zarar.dev/good-software-development-habits/ Finally someone who explained me Kent Beck’s “For each desired change, first make the change easy (this may be hard); then make the change”. It is explained in terms of refactoring. Aim for at least half of all commits to be refactorings. Continuous refactoring is thinking of changes I can make in under 10 minutes that improve something. Doing this pays off whenever a bigger requirement comes in and you find yourself making a small change to satisfy it only because of those smaller improvements. Big refactorings are a bad idea.