2020#56 Readings of the Week
4 minutes read | 832 words by Ruben BerenguelThis is a bit late because I have automated something.
Sorry for being a bit late, but I was busy rewriting the automation I use to help me generate this posts from my reading. Now instead of having some AppleScript, I have some Haskell.
I think there would be interest in a book like Automate the Boring Stuff with Haskell. Ping me if you’d like to see something like that, I’m starting to have plenty of personal examples.
Let’s build a Full-Text Search engine
Short and to the point is the kind of posts I want to share with you. This is written in Go, but should be understandable regardless of your usual programming language.
Decision Table Patterns
Decision tables are a very lightweight and effective formal verification system.
Massive memory overhead: Numbers in Python and how NumPy helps
It’s always worth remembering that everything in Python is an object including numbers and thus carry object overhead. Using numpy is a way to avoid this overhead with numbers, for objects using __slots__ can also have a significant impact.
Making Skeletonised Leaves
This sounds like a fun weekend project. We have loads of the required ingredients from when we prepared soap at home
Ryan Holiday’s 33 Favorite Pieces of Advice for Life
Some inspiring ones. And some pretty obvious ones, of course.
Generative Bad Handwriting
A form of asemic writing in p5.js (my framework of choice for generative art), that can be compressed in a tweet. Very neat, and a very good explanation.
How I practice at what I do
Sigh, if I had time.
Pablo Stafforini’s Forecasting System
The “science” of forecasting is still pretty muddy, but this is an interesting read regardless. Also, emacs user!
New Game, the First Offered by RAND to Public, Challenges Players to Design Defense Strategies for Uncertain World
🤔
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
Some people’s attention to detail is through the roof. Typeset in the Future is one such blog.
Delta Engine Introduction and Overview of How it Works
This is what “Photon” (mentioned before) is, or at least its announcement.
Void Is a Smell
This is for a Haskell “void” function, one like M a => M (). It indeed looks disturbing, forgetful.
Man dies from eating more than a bag of liquorice a day
This is bananas.
Turbocharge Azure Databricks with Photon powered Delta Engine
Photon is a vectorized query engine that seems to be experimental. Not sure if available anywhere else. Deep inside of me, I wonder if this is related to Flare. Which kind of I always assume, when “Spark” and “native code” appear together.
A Pipeline Made of Airbags
This is a pretty insightful post. Docker/Kubernetes style of deploys are a bit like an old comic about “how do you upgrade your Mac” (I’m not sure if this is the original image, it’s the oldest I could find: if you know the original source let me know and I’ll change the link).
Adobe unveils ambitious multi-year vision for PDF: Introduces Liquid Mode
I kind of got a good laugh at this.
Did indigenous Americans and Vikings trade in the year 1000?
I’m a bit wary of this essay, since at least one fact mentioned (that Iceland had no trees) is as far as I remember false (it was eventually barren of trees due to overharvesting).
The Management Flywheel
In other words, getting small wins adds momentum to the teams' flywheel (famous metaphor from Jim Collins).
Optimised Row Columnar for Haskell
I want to have a look at the code after this post! I am also curious to see how it compares to the Java readers in Spark, for example.
Why RudderStack Used Postgres Over Apache Kafka for Streaming Engine
The reasons are sound, and Postgres is always a good choice. For more and more things.
Very short functions are a code smell – an overview of the science on function length
I only skimmed it, but the results and sources look legit.
🍿 The Craft of Writing Effectively
This was well worth the watch.
Parametric lamp design using circle packings
I have only seen circle packings used for discrete complex analysis (the details are too long to write here, but it is a fascinating subject). Lamps… it’s another story.
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