2021#21 Readings
4 minutes read | 772 words by Ruben BerenguelThis past week we were on holidays 🎉.
We spent a few days in Cadaqués, a small coastal town in the north of Catalonia. We ate extremely well.
View from Cadaqués
📯 Setting up Kafka with SSL and accessing it with Go
It shouldn’t be hard, but setting up a local instance of Kafka with custom/local SSL certificates and getting it to work without hostname validation turns out very tricky. At least now I can go back to this post to look up the steps needed.
📯 JSON woes in Apache Spark
Sometimes Spark features become antifeatures.
‘Sleep is venture capital’: employers wake up to benefits of a nap
Did they get the Spanish data from “Topics and prejudices, UK edition”?
What Makes a Unicorn CTO?
Many (sometimes conflicting) priorities pull CTOs around, making it a complex job.
🐦 Last week…"
… I sat for an internal interview about my career progression to high level IC engineer, with a focus on how I’ve never felt I needed to become a manager to gain influence. I thought I would share some of my career advice for aspiring IC “lifers.
If your growth has stalled, consider switching jobs. You will very likely get a promotion and more money, with less political heartache.
How Discord Stores Billions of Messages
I have worked very little with Cassandra, and found it delicate to handle. You need to know a lot about how it works to leverage it at scale. That’s not bad, but can be inconvenient.
Data Lineage at Slack
Going to the level of parsing SQL, that sounds the right level for lineage to me.
Fastest table sort in the West - Redesigning DuckDB’s sort
These are some brilliant results. I have used DuckDB as a local replacement for wrangling CSV/Parquet and it performs beautifully.
🐦 Thread by @incunabula
It’s a bit cheesy, but talks about books and sandwiches.
Teaching Smart People How to Learn
It doesn’t have a lot of do’s, but it has many examples of don’ts. It’s pretty long though.
Single Decisive Reasoning (SDR)
Why are blended reasons so dangerous? Because weak reasons rarely build on each other – but when they’re numerous they appear compelling.
I have the feeling of having read this before. Basically, when going for something have at least one strong reason. Many small reasons don’t add up to a strong one. Compare with Derek Sivers' Hell yeah or no.
Why is it almost impossible to meet deadlines?
A great article by Christophe Blefari. Mentions many of the issues that plague data engineering teams, and offers some useful solutions. As usual, your workplace might be totally different, but I’m pretty sure you can apply something from here.
Accelerated Expertise (book summary from Commoncog)
A pity it’s very hard to apply for real-world (personal) learning, since the focus is on companies/broad areas. The ideas here are very useful anyway.
Where Work Is a Religion, Work Burnout Is Its Crisis of Faith
The definitions of burnout given here are so close to things I have felt myself it’s scary: I only suspected I may have been burnout. There are longer ways to put it, but in one line, quoted, would be:
There’s a gulf between what they expected from their jobs and what they got.
Also interesting is a study about quietness/multitasking and IQ (emphasis mine):
[…] one group was asked to take an IQ test while distracted by e-mails and ringing telephones. The uninterrupted group did better by an average of ten points, which wasn’t much of a surprise. What was a surprise is that the e-mailers also did worse, by an average of six points, than a group in a similar study that had been tested while stoned […]
How I Write Code: Pen & Paper
I only use pen and paper for design, sometimes the design might get close to an implementation “in drawing” though.
