2021#15 Readings
5 minutes read | 860 words by Ruben Berenguel
📯 Graphviz (live) editor
A few days ago I wanted to create some diagrams with Graphviz, and found out I could use d3-graphviz to render DOT files from the sofa, with my iPad. One thing led to another, and I wrote a relatively simple live editor for Graphviz, with partial autocompletion and some embedded images. You can find more details by visiting its repository.
Graphviz (live) editor
📯 Centering and resizing figures in PDF export with pandoc
The place I wanted to put the diagram mentioned above was a Markdown file I was exporting with Pandoc. Centering and resizing images in a Markdown-to-PDF conversion is weird with Pandoc.
How to Use Generators and yield in Python
As usual with realpython explanations, an excellent post.
JPL’s Design for a Clockwork Rover to Explore Venus
This sounds like so fun an engineering idea.
Exploring 2D differential growth with JavaScript
I’ve wanted to write some differential growth for a while, but I have slowly realised my personal intersefction of interest/fun in generative art is generating static images.
Questionable Advice: “After Being A Manager, Can I Be Happy As A Cog?”
It sounds like you are willing to endure being a manager, so long as that is useful or required in order to tackle bigger and harder problems. Nothing wrong with that! But when the music stops, it’s time to move on.
🍿 How to Live Code Music in JavaScript using Tone.js and Ace Editor
It’s not a beautiful way to do it (triggering sequence to pull from the editor). I was going to write my own but got sidetracked by doing mostly the same with Graphviz (Graphviz live editor)
🍿 Seattle Poster in ukiyo-e “Japanese Woodblock” Style - Process!
A video on a drawing using Procreate.
Painless Functional Specifications – Part 1: Why Bother?
It makes a very good case for specifications. Although good user stories should be functional specifications.
Vilnius, Lithuania built a ‘portal’ to another city to help keep people connected
Things like this and Google’s Starline will probably shape the future.
Better JSON in Postgres with PostgreSQL 14
The new syntax looks significantly more polished. By the way, GIN stands for generalized inverted index.
An Unbelievable Demo
The closest story I have is being contacted by a recruiter offering me my current position (several years ago).
File:God the Geometer.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
That looks eerily similar to a Mandelbrot set, limb and filaments and all.
How ‘One Hundred and One Dalmatians’ Saved Disney
Using Xerox machines to streamline the process was key. Also worth noting, Sleeping Beauty (the previous Disney movie to 101) flopped in box office.
Leaving Spark behind, Databricks enters new territory as it eyes 2021 IPO
The move from Spark Summit to Spark+AI Summit to Data+AI Summit was a telltale sign: you can’t differentiate much if you are “just a Spark reseller”, regardless of how smart your team is and good your offerings are.
Fuzzing is Beta Ready
I’m eagerly awaiting the generics release to pick up Go again.
Load Testing with Koi Pond
At Slack they test the application by simulating “fake” web users, by the million. I think this is a very good approach, and have tried similar things for our services/processes.
Privacy watchers see fears coming true with Google’s FLoC
This is a very thorough walk through about what uses you can get out of FLoC ids.
Developers can’t fix bad management
I don’t think the title exactly fits the content, but it’s insightful.
An incomplete list of skills senior engineers need, beyond coding
Solid list, what else could I add?
The Curse of the A-word
It’s Actor and is kind of a rant on the amount of non-understanding of what the actor model actually entails.
Visualizing Distributions with Raincloud Plots with ggplot2
Didn’t know what a raincloud plot was, but the idea behind this post is sound and I’ll try to apply if I ever need to do any serious visualization work.
Tsunago: the pencil sharpener that creates a never-ending pencil
This is both a crazy idea and a great idea.
Announcing Photon Public Preview: The Next Generation Query Engine on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform
Looking forward to using it, at last.
Scaling your API with rate limiters
I had never actively thought of the different forms a rate limiter can have. Here Stripe shows several approaches and in which cases each may be useful.
