2020#51 Readings of the Week
6 minutes read | 1130 words by Ruben BerenguelI should remove the Weekly moniker of these posts and emails. They are done when they are done. Enjoy!
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Why Write ADRs
I love the idea of ADRs, but I still haven’t managed to convince teammates to use them.
Haskell Extensions
Well, you don’t need that many language extensions for most work. Just stick with OverloadedStrings, GeneralisedNewtypeDeriving , and ApplicativeDo.
Unraveling the linothorax mystery, or how linen armor came to dominate our lives
Don’t shoot your grads. It’s bad for the environment.
🍿 Cedric Chin: Using Blogging To Think Independently
I have been following Cedric’s writing for a while. It was a somewhat interesting interview.
🍿 Phil Wadler: Featherweight Go
Luckily for Go developers, Phil could convince others that interfaces are enough to have generiticity.
Black Triangles
A classic on start small and get it working.
📚 Finding Success and Failure in Haskell
You can find my full review here.
IDE 2020: Haskell Language Server, binaries and installation
I had managed to configure ghcide on VS Code, but only if the version in Stack was exactly correct. This new VS Code plugin manages to figure it out (well, and add a lot of downloads to .stack) and install always the correct version. Totally recommended.
The UX of LEGO Interface Panels
Lego, what else do I need to say?
Ask and Show HN: Ever coded for love? Willing to share?
This is heart-warming to see.
Paper and Plotter: A 3D Surface
Fun!
How Covid-19 Signals the End of the American Era
Crystallising some things you may also see.
Applicative Functors
I didn’t fully get Applicative in Finding Success (and Failure) in Haskell, this helped.
📚 Managing Oneself
Short. Most can be found in other books by Drucker. Still useful.
Taylor Swift as classic programming textbooks, a twitter thread
Approved.
The Pandemic-Era Appeal of Labyrinths
I don’t have a backyard, sadly.
🍿 FP to the min
A “classic” John de Goes talk. A very thorough refactoring from buggy imperative code to bug-free functional (ZIO style) code.
A Personal History of the Career Moat
Cedric’s blog is a trove of good content. I have been thinking of career moats (without having the concept itself) for the past 3 or 4 years (I tried to fomrulate some of it when I analysed future tech trends here).
Time Allocation as Capital Allocation
Another one from Cedric. Interesting idea: can we apply Kelly’s Criterion to time allocation for our pursuits?
The Impact of Toxic Influencers on Communities
If you are part of any online community (not only the ones I’m part of) you can probably think of someone like this.
4 powerful features Python is still missing
Can’t argue with these. Although we might as well use Scala 3, which will have significant whitespace and has all of these already.
Exactly-Once Initialization in Asynchronous Python
Singletons are tricky in multi-processing code. Async python is not exactly multiprocessing, but things can happen at the same time so handling this issue is required anyway.
JavaScript Balloon 1k postmortem
The demo scene is alive and well, and you can find the most approachable version in the JS1K competitions each year. Most contestants write their how-to, and this one is super interesting.
📚 Your code as a crime scene
While the ideas are interesting (I already used some, and will write some tools for others for fun), the packaging (i.e. the story and the book itself) are not that great. I would still recommend it for the ideas on it, though.
📚 Good Strategy, Bad Strategy
Book of the year for me so far. Expect a long review some day.
📚 Impact Mapping
The tool looks pretty useful (could complement a Wardley map) but this could be summarised in a moderately long blog post. Not even very long.
Click Here to Kill
It was a dark and stormy web…
📚 Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
It’s a quick read, of not much use.
Master Bottle Filler
I want to do this.
The code I’m still ashamed of
This is pretty impactful. Must read if you code for a living or manage coders for a living.
On Trouser Pockets
👖 🤔
The Adjacent User Theory
There is an awesome underlying idea here that I think extends further than “product”. I need to think more about it.
When SimCity got serious: the story of Maxis Business Simulations and SimRefinery
This is some really obscure post. I miss Simcity 2000, that was real good.
Optimizing Ray Tracing in Haskell
It’s always good seeing tips to optimise Haskell even if I don’t write Haskell (yet?).
topos
An easy read on what topos are by John Baez. You need some knowledge of category theory, but not a lot.
Tempering Expectations for GPT-3 and OpenAI’s API
Caveats and stoppers from GPT-3 and its (real) impact.
The Fundamentals of Roadmapping
It’s not rocket science after all: people usually plan for harder things than a roadmap. Follow the guidelines here!
A gentle introduction to HDBSCAN and density-based clustering
This is immediately understandable, great explanation of this family of algorithms.
Bacteria with a metal diet discovered in dirty glassware
Fascinating.
[Python-ideas] Bringing the print statement back
Seriously, just write a Pandas backend for Scala 3.
HCrystalBall — a unified interface to time-series forecasting
I haven’t run ARMA or ARIMAA in… ages (last time may have been in R, and if you know me, you know how long ago that was), but they are a good tool in the toolbelt and this looks like the definitive McGyver in your pocket.
Competitive hotdog eaters nearing limit of human performance
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Rust is Surprisingly Good as a Server Language
It timed out the first time I tried to open, so maybe not yet.
How a Long-Lost Perfume Got a Second Life After 150 Years Underwater
I would have expected the perfume to go rancid even with a perfect seal (due to oxidation). Now I can’t help wonder how it smells, the description is not enough!
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