2020#19 Readings
4 minutes read | 771 words by Ruben BerenguelA week on holidays (in-between jobs), where I read more books than articles.
I have tried to avoid doing “fake work” (although I started a Scala project I want to finish “soon-ish”), because I rarely “really” take time off. So I tried to sleep a lot and do nothing useful. I failed miserably.
How a young Iraqi programmer tried to adapt Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving hero story
As a game, the title leaves a bit to be desired since basically he didn’t.
🔊 User Story Mapping
I forgot to mark this as read, finished a month or two ago. It was very interesting, although the audiobook is not the ideal format for this particular book, which seems to be diagram heavy. I’ll have to check the Kindle or paperback versions too.
📚 Slack
The last part on risk mitigation and management was a bit boring, but overall the book was interesting. It was a hard contrast with Andy Grove’s High Output Management, which I have been listening to at the same time (same week, not at the same exact time). DeMarco rails against many of the things Grove suggests doing.
🔊 The Power of Full Engagement
This was actually a form of re-read, I had totally forgotten I had read this book 4 years ago and got it on Audible. It sounded familiar overall… and my impression was kind of meh, this second time around. Probably also the first one.
🍿 Goodbye Print, Hello Debugger!
I’m a print-style debugger, and for what I think is a good reason: I frequently switch languages (python, scala, go) and never delved into any debugger except gdb and valgrind when I did only numerical stuff in C.
🍿 Painting an eye with maths
Shader magic by Iñigo Quilez. I prefer my (non-shader) version, but it took me way longer and uses different approach for the iris shape and texture.
Comparative benchmarks between ZIO 2 and Cats Effects 3
I’d lean towards Cats, but they are pretty close overall.
A plant that ‘cannot die’ reveals its genetic secret
Fascinating. And genetic engineering of plants may be the only option aside from human extinction (which would be pretty OK to the planet overall).
🍿 Getting started with Metals IDE (particularly Scala3)
This is a very good pitch for Metals, the Scala language server. I’ve been using it since it was very, very new (I have contributed to at least one of the “meta” repositories, but I don’t think I have helped with Metals itself… yet?). It makes Scala in VS Code as entertaining to write as Haskell, with go-to-definition, completions and all the bells and whistles you may want.
Adam Savage on Lists, More Lists, and the Power of Checkboxes
Checklists are magical superpowers.
Why the Tomato Was Feared in Europe for More Than 200 Years
Beware of the 🍅
How Airbnb Built “Wall” to prevent data bugs
Data quality is hard. Even defining what to check, when to check, how to alert and even what is an alert for is hard.
First ‘Time Crystal’ Built Using Google’s Quantum Computer
The one created in a diamond sounds more interesting.
Reduce WIP by practicing trunk-based development, rather than pull requests
This is throwing the baby with the bath water. The problem is having large tasks. If tickets are small enough, the turnaround of PRs and reviews improves throughput.
Hudi, Iceberg and Delta Lake: Data Lake Table Formats Compared
The conclusions are worth checking: a clear set of guidelines on which to pick depending on your use case.
700,000 lines of code, 20 years, and one developer: How Dwarf Fortress is built
I haven’t played in a few years, I loved adventure mode in particular.
🔊 High Output Management
As mentioned above, this had some cringey parts when listened together with Slack. It’s hard to actually know what’s a good approach.
