2022#13 Readings 🇺🇦🌻
4 minutes read | 690 words by Ruben BerenguelI was on J on the Beach, so skipped last weekend.
Optimizing GoAWK with a bytecode compiler and virtual machine
These are the kind of optimisations I like to read about.
Why Don’t You Use …
The amount of reasons why you don’t use all these other possible technologies far outweigh the reasons you may be able to give for why you use the one you do.
Great One-Pagers. Tips for writing great one-pagers
By John Cutler. One-pagers seem really useful. But the ones I have seen so far are longer than one page…
📻 Find Joy in Any Job: What Do I Really Love To Do?
This was interesting to hear (from HBRs IdeaCast).
📚 The Rithmatist
I felt like reading some fiction, and decided to finally cave in and read something by Brandon Sanderson. I was recommended this one by Laia and a friend, and it’s a very entertaining, short book. It reminded me in some subtle ways to Jasper Fforde’s Shades of Grey, which is another dystopian book I enjoyed greatly.
📚 Shadow and Claw: The first half of the Book of the New Sun
This half is formed by Shadow of the Torturer and The Claw of the Conciliator. Wasn’t sure what to expect, starts slow and weird, then slowly picks up pace and gets you coming for more. Now for the other half
Refactor Organisation - to build the technology right
Wow, this was probably extremely tough.
Something We Can All Agree On? Corporate Buzzwords Are the Worst.
This is a meaningful article.
New Proof Reveals the Hidden Structure of Common Equations
Quanta Magazine articles are always a joy to read. They also make research in pure mathematics sound more interesting (and at the same time, less interesting) than they really are.
🍿 Hyperspace: An Indexing Subsystem for Apache Spark
👀 glanceI missed having more details on the work of getting Spark to use the index for query planning.
Data quality with Soda.io at americanas
I’m eyeing Soda as an open source data quality tool, after having it recommended by Ilmari Aalto once they fully open-sourced their code.
The Voice in the Soot: Humanity’s Earliest Known Recording
Interesting read. This is a recording predating by 17 years those of Edison and Cros.
My typical working day as Software Engineer
Well, that worked until becoming a manager. I also like the slight jab at Cal Newport’s Deep Work at the end. I have said it on occasion: what’s preached in Deep Work is actionable and realistic when you are a researcher at a University.
Scripting with Go
Not bad. The main issue with shells (for me) is the lack of typing and testing, ignoring the elephant in the room which is how horrible writing anything large is in bash. I have tried alternatives (the one I prefer is writing shell scripts in AWK, but that has no typing and no better testing), like Haskell’s turtle and Scala’s ammonite, but they are somewhat too verbose. This looks better.
Prattfalls: Better Communication
Roy has many interesting posts. In this one, he frames communication as changing the internal state of others (idea based on a book he read many years prior). I find that this framing has the advantage of being external to the communication itself, as well as to those communicating. By thinking it in such terms you can plan better what you want to say.
