2019#7 Readings of the week
3 minutes read | 448 words by Ruben BerenguelFormal methods, Scala, productivity. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.
Solving Knights and Knaves with Alloy
Once you start your journey down the formal methods rabbit hole (which I started with TLA+) you can never stop. This is a very good introduction to Alloy, a modelling language which seems well suited for data structure descriptions (not procedural/step-time models)
Seeking the Productive Life: Some Details of My Personal Infrastructure
As much as I don’t like Stephen Wolfram, his obsessive take on being productive echoes mine. And that worries me.
Encryption Key Hierarchies in Alloy
Next after the intro above, this is a short post about how you would set up a reasonable hierarchy of keys in an organisation. Something like “Infrastructure team owns infrastructure keys, developers own GitHub” but with more layers. Then you can automatically check somebody has access to stuff, etc. Neat.
Is your Scala object always a singleton?
The guys at SoftwareMill (excellent technical blog and people) stumbled upon this. The kind of bug that could defeat you, but they succeeded, and documented it for the rest of us.
Proving Games are Winnable with Alloy
And the final instalment in this week’s formal method extravaganza, how to prove a randomised game (say, Zelda) can be winnable using Alloy.
Don’t Let the Internet Dupe you, Event Sourcing is Hard
Yep, can totally agree, I’ve hit some of the roadblocks and fun moments the author shares. As usual, some HackerNews comments can be enlightening.
On Being A Senior Engineer
There are many definitions of what being senior is, but you can’t go wrong trying to follow these suggestions
Hold the front pages: meet the endpaper enthusiasts
I’m pretty sure you didn’t know there are collectors of endpaper.
Beating hash tables with trees? The ART-ful radix trie
A synopsis of a data structure paper, about ART radix tries. They are kind-of-like tries, but try to use less memory.
Scala pattern matching: apply the unapply
In case you didn’t know how pattern matching works (hint: unapply), this post will tell you.
buffer-expose emacs package
A package released late last week, it helps you navigate your open buffers in a visual way. Pretty neat, and even with my usual 20+ buffers seems to work seamlessly.
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