2020#50 Readings of the Week
6 minutes read | 1198 words by Ruben BerenguelI was a week off, and this delayed this post by a week. So, this is a long one: have fun for the 50th edition!
Picture I took from La Giralda, Sevilla
NOTE: This is a heavy edition due to encompassing 2 weeks. Python, Agile, maths, Apache Spark. 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.
David Strachan on Twitter: “I’ve made a teaching aid for people making platformer games […]"
The amount of depth and nuance in any subject is wonderful.
Reopened Theme Parks Ban Screaming on Roller Coasters. Riders Are Howling
In space Japan no-one can hear you scream.
Hypermodern Python 4: Typing
Only thing I found missing is mentioning Instagram’s monkeytype, which I found reasonably useful for my small use cases.
My first foray into Rust
I’m in the regular cycle of renewing my interest in Rust. This is a post from a Haskeller, has found Rust pretty good.
📚 The Coding Career Handbook
By swyx, who has a tendency to write good things on his blog. This is book-sized. Can recommend.
The Road to Burnout is Paved With Context Switching
Yeah, worst weeks for me are when I’ve had no time to focus even for a bit. Happens more often than I want to see at work.
Gareth Harney on Twitter: “1) A stranger than fiction Roman ring mystery thread…"
…and in the darkness bind them.
Fruit salad: a scrum estimation scale
Although it may look silly, the descriptions of the fruits and how they relate to the estimate and how I mentally “see” tasks of that size are a perfect match.
Support for static typing · Issue #3342 · pytest-dev/pytest
Good news everyone!
Scaling Pandas: Dask vs Ray vs Modin vs Vaex vs RAPIDS
It’s a short comparison, but lays the landscape pretty well. For me Ray and Dask are the main “it’s not Spark and is on Python” at the moment, not counting Koalas.
Model 777
Wow
AI Training Costs Are Improving at 50x the Speed of Moore’s Law
This is an interesting trend to keep in mind. What impact will/may ARM processors have later on?
A Dangerous and Evil Piano Piece
Satie’s pieces are always surprising. Not sure I want to listen to this one though
🔊 Norse Mythology
Entertaining enough.
AHA Programming 💡
Found via The Coding Career Handbook mentioned before. I usually go for a write everything twice approach, if the abstraction seems clear, otherwise I donkt mind repeatingbcopy pasting until there is a good general solution. I guess thatks AHA in the end.
2 + 1 = 4, by quinoa
Maths are weird.
Monzo – Tone of Voice
There are some good recommendations for clear writing (I can think of a company that should remain unnamed – they have been creating a “future of keyboards” for 5+ years and counting, and still delivered none customers have paid for – that would benefit from this guide).
Flo Crivello on Twitter: “GPT3 writing code. A compiler from natural language to code […]” / Twitter
🤔🤔🤔
Monads in Python (with nice syntax!)
This is a concise implementation, and his actor with continuations is something I need to think about.
Use glom
I found out Glom a few weeks ago, and although I haven’t used it for anything yet, I know several pieces in bear-note-graph and motllo that would benefit from it
🍿 Make the world better? Remove some Javascript
A short (5 minutes) intro to what Skulpt does to compile Python to Javascript and how callbacks were introduced.
Richard Wright, Masaoka Shiki, and the Haiku of Confinement
Short poems, made slowly. I need a cold drink.
Announcing Pylance: Fast, feature-rich language support for Python in Visual Studio Code | Python
I would prefer a better language server for Emacs, but this doesn’t look bad. I’m tempted to give VS Code another shot, if only it had (performant) emacs or vim keybindings…
Python pattern matching: Guards and or-patterns might not interact in the way you expect
I didn’t find the “surprising” guard issue surprising. At the worst case, you have variable aliasing, which is very bad to have written in the first place.
Don’t Kill Time
David Perell sometimes takes himself and his writing too seriously, but this is a good one (and to be fair he writes pretty well, otherwise I wouldn’t bother reading him).
It’s probably time to stop recommending Clean Code
Shared without comments, I don’t want flamewars.
Sphere Eversion
I found out about sphere eversions on Francis’ A topological picturebook, an entertaining book about how to draw some kind of mathematics by hand. Now we have D3 which is without discussion better. Also worth checking Idyll, it’s on my “to play with” list.
Create wonderful things, be good, have fun: Klutz Press, books for having fun
Editorialised title. I think I learnt juggling from one of their sets, and their harmonica book is basically Gindick’s Rock & Blues Harmonica book, which is didactically excellent and pretty fun to read 👍👍👍
Cognitive Restructuring: The Complete Guide to Changing Negative Thinking
Have a read, could help to apply this before you need it.
Hypermodern Python 3: Linting
This works as an excellent introduction to using Nox, in addition to helping configure Flake.
Crafting “Crafting Interpreters”
Sometimes knowing how the sausage is made makes for a tastier sausage.
The Facebook ad boycotts have entered the big leagues. Now what?
The knock off (or knock on? knock up?) effect in increased spend elsewhere can be interesting to monitor in the industry.
Handling Data Skew in Apache Spark
🧂
A gentle introduction to Doc2Vec
I’m falling into the NLP rabbit hole (brings back memories). This time Doc2Vec, there is some LDA/LDI incoming as well.
Rainbow – an attempt to display colour on a B&W monitor
This is pretty smart.
Biased Benchmarks
A honest summary of what can go wrong (and what did go wrong) when you benchmark your code against a competing product/project.
Modern SAT solvers
SAT solvers (and in general, constraint solvers) are one of those black magic tools I want to learn more. A bit like TLA+ or Alloy a few years back: you may never use them for anything, but knowing they are there at your disposal is powerful.
Facebook releases AI development tool based on NetHack
Computer plays
in a computer maze
- killed by a newt
Buy me a coffee