2020#43 Readings of the Week

March 28, 2020 4 minutes read | 682 words by Ruben Berenguel

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The full lockdown edition. Almost no engineering ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. The lack of commute is hard on reading articles.

NOTE: Apache Spark, engineering and a lot of remote working. 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.

Executing Spark code with expr and eval

Feels a bit like cheating, and is using a semi-private interface (expr) but for quick spark-shell explorations looks excellent.

Fast subsets of large datasets with Pandas and SQLite

Technically, you could have stayed with the SQLite part. You can load CSV files directly into SQLite with the directives .mode csv and .import filename tablename from within the SQLite CLI client.

What’s the Point of Applicative?

Not for newbies to the weird functional world, but very well explained.

A Light Box in Heavy Times

Damn impressive DIY project. At least for me, I’m really bad with electronics.

Trunk Based Development

I can see how this could work very well. Usually I am for a “I can deploy at any time with no hassle”, but getting to trunk based requires a level of testing not everybody is “happy” with.

When you work in adtech, you need to stay up in adtech stuff. Webkit is always at the forefront of privacy, by the way.

Mise en Place Writing

Don’t just write, but plan.

The secret field that nobody will tell you about

Neat walk through in the creation of a field extension of the rationals.

🍿 Picking Up Glowing Hot Space Shuttle Tiles with Bare Hands

Wow, that’s some slow termal transfer there.

🍿 Q&A with a person who does not have an internal monologue

I’ve shared previously the no-monologue post, here’s an interview.

Helsinki Bus Station Theory

Unrelated to the content of the post, but I have actually been in that station.

Rare Andean bears flock to cloud forest to feast on wild avocados | Environment | The Guardian

This headline was so good I had to add it.

Here Dragons Abound: Creating a Pencil Effect in SVG

It’s not the first time I share something from Here dragons abound and it won’t be the last.

Happy Hour Goes Online as Coronavirus Forces Everyone Inside

Blending social drinking with drinking alone

Identifying Bot Commenters on Reddit using Benford’s Law

Benford’s law (a certain distribution of leading digits in naturally occuring sequences) can detect some cases of fraud, although it always feels like cheating a bit.

Recursive SQL Queries with PostgreSQL

The first step to understand recursion is to understand recursion.

Work in the Time of Corona

These are interesting times, and remote working is here now for everybody. I have worked remotely or semi-remotely for more than 10 years, so it’s not new for me. You may find interesting things here though.

This Extremely Chill Landscape Was Drawn in Pure Code

I’m more of a Peter Griffin styled CSS user, so this blows my mind

Bending the Curves of Productivity

This is a very interesting classification of productivity methods

Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve”

Won’t surprise anybody at this point, but this was written early enough. Most countries could have done more earlier.

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