Read it or Throw it #208

1. https://github.com/YaronWittenstein/productivity-tips-for-mac

I detailed list of productivity tips and tricks I'm using, maybe you'll find them useful to you too

2. AI Is Not the End of Software Developers

A good article talking about how AI can play as an assistance role in software development

3.  Getafix: How Facebook tools learn to fix bugs automatically

Facebook use AI to auto-detect common code bugs and how to fix them

4. Why Discord, Pinterest, Moz and Bleacher Report use Elixir. Case studies

In case you want to show your boss that Elixir is mature enough to be used in production use, send him this article and https://elixir-companies.com/

5. Amazon Timestream - Fast, scalable, fully managed time series database

Amazon releases their own time-series database. It'll be interesting to see how it'll affect InfluxDB and others

6. New for AWS Lambda – Use Any Programming Language and Share Common Components

This is big news!

7. Google Cloud wants to make it easier for data scientists to share models

Google promotes sharing AI models between data scientists.

Probably a GitHub-like platform for data scientists is just a matter of time

8. We Are Typists First, Programmers Second

The key point is that a competent programmer can't let his slow him down

9. GitLab's Secret to Multi-Million-Dollar Success: All 350 Employees Work Remotely

It's very encouraging to see more big and successful companies that work in a distributed structure 

10. Recommended video: Sergio Benitez, The Rust programming language

A great introductory video about why Rust is awesome

“Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible”

Alan Kay

Read it or Throw it #207

1. Cloud Computing without Containers

CloudFlare leverages the V8 engine for their serverless (workers) infra.

This is a very promising strategy since the future will rely on WebAssembly and the end of the javascript as the only Frontend language

2. Rust can be difficult to learn and frustrating, but it’s also the most exciting thing in software development in a long time

Paul Dix, Influxdata CEO gives his take about Rust (Influxdb is written in Go)

3. HTTP/3

The usage of TCP in the browsers will be eventually superseded (gradually) by QUIC (reliable protocol on top of UDP) and the internet will be much faster thanks to that

4. Why I Switched My Keyboard from QWERTY to Colemak. How to Type Faster with a More Efficient Keyboard Layout

I'm now in the middle of learning a new keyboard layout called Colemak. So far it's been going well. I prefer Colemak over Dvorak since Colemak has fewer characters changes

5. GitHub launches Actions, its workflow automation tool

Github wants to be a one-stop-shop for all the code management lifecycle too (the same vision as GitLab)

6. Three 20-Year-Old Founders Raise $4.5M For Their Cloud-Powered IDE

This is huge, not only because the founders are very young but because of the innovative concept of having an IDE backed by a super-computer power

7. If you want to level up as an engineer, read the code. All of it

I tend to agree with this article. However, anyone has a limit of how much code he/she can read. I think that reading all your territory and understand where it fits into the big picture is a huge productivity

8. The fear of an empty source file - Ayende

I really agree with this article. It's very hard to bootstrap a new project

and the more you know might make it even harder 

9. RealtimeBoard, a visual collaboration platform for companies, raises $25M

I loved the concept of this product

10. Bad Writing Is Destroying Your Company’s Productivity

I usually write my emails with numbered bullets in order to have order and clarify what I want to say

"Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who'll argue with you" 

John Wooden

Read it or Throw it #206

1. How Discord Stores Billions of Messages

Discord explaining why they went with Cassandra for their messages storage

and how they implemented their sharding using a composite key

2. GitLab raises $100 million from Iconiq, GV, and Khosla, at $1.1 billion valuation

GitLab aims to be a one-stop-shop for all development cycle 

3. Paradigms of Rust for the Go developer

An informative article that focuses on Rust concurrency vs Go concurrency

4. SQream Boasts 15x Speedup for GPU Data Warehouse

Another database I'd really like to experiment someday

5. Debug considerations for high level system architecture (by Ayende)

Debuggability is one of the most important capabilities of a production-ready Software

6. Garbage Collection vs Automatic Reference Counting

Two of the most common techniques for automatically reclaiming unused memory

(read also how Rust manages memory here)

7. Cloud Spanner Live Demo

A very short video demonstrating briefly Google Spanner 

8. WebAssembly on Cloudflare Workers

The future of CDN capabilities is running code on the Edge and Cloudflare seems to be taking the lead here

9. The most important skill you can learn

A nice life-hacking article

10. 12 Shocking Habits of Successful People (YouTube)

Some good tips for increasing our daily productivity (I can sympathise with some of them)

Make It Work Make It Right Make It Fast

Kent Beck

Read it or Throw it #205

1. Elixir v1.7 released

Six months have passed since the v1.6 and this release comes with many refinements.

I like the new IEx metadata printing!

2. Tech Preview: Redis Enterprise 5.3 with Streams is here!

RedisLabs Enterprise Edition has now Redis Streams as a preview version.

3. In Pursuit of Production Minimalism

TL;DR - don't own a too broad technology stack just for the sake of being cool.

strive to be pragmatic and don't bloat your tech with too many new shiny tools that might not be useful.

What matters is a working production software that could evolve over time

I really liked and agreed with this article.

4. Prometheus monitoring tool joins Kubernetes as CNCF’s latest ‘graduated’ project

I didn't use that tool yet but I probably will in the future

5. InfluxDB - Why We're Building Flux, a New Data Scripting and Query Language

InfluxDB (you can say Prometheus competitor) started defining on a new query language

for its product 

6. It's Okay To Store Data In Kafka

A good article of Confluent talking about an emerging pattern for having a single source of truth of the data backed by Kafka 

7. You don’t need standup

Honestly I agree with pretty much everything. Having a daily standup adds a lot of burden, gets almost always lengthy and instead of being an energy booster turns to be a fatigue increaser.

8. Crates.io just passed RubyGems in number of new packages per day

Another indication that Rust will be huge

9. The Myth of 'I'm Bad at Math'

Explain the strong relation between being good at math (but applies to other fields as well) and having the right guidance and mindset

10. Grit: the power of passion and perseverance

A short TED talk about the importance of having Grit for success

“Never try to be better than someone else. Learn from others, and try to be the best you can be. Success is the by-product of that preparation.”

John Wooden

Read it or Throw it #204

1. WebAssembly is more than the web

WebAssembly is the future and it'll be all over the place

2. The Epic Story of Dropbox's Exodus From the Amazon Cloud Empire

A fascinating article describing the journey of Dropbox infrastructure since its inception until today

3. Conduit 0.5.0 and the future of Conduit

Service mesh are still in the beginning, but this company has a promising future 

4. Kubernetes: Core Concepts 

Kubernetes is gaining popularity on a very fast pace, it's worth knowing the high-level concepts

5. Mechanical Sympathy: Understanding the Hardware Makes You a Better Developer

I came across the term Mechanical Sympathy and I thought it was worth sharing

6. repl.it - Online REPL, Compiler & IDE

useful web online REPL for many programming languages

7. Hick's law

Sometimes knowing too much makes decision taking much tougher

8. All it takes is 10 mindful minutes

I've heard the word Mindfulness in many places so here's a TED talk 

9. Why ‘Find your passion!’ may be bad advice

A nice perspective  

10. Recommended Book - Think Like a Warrior: The Five Inner Beliefs That Make You Unstoppable

It's a non-technical book but it's still recommended for anyone who wants becoming more productive and successful

Nothing works better than just improving your product

Joel Spolsky

Read it or Throw it #203

1. “The work on streams is finished. Release candidate No. 1 is weeks away.” -@antirez, Founder of #Redis #RedisConf 

see also: Streams: a new general purpose data structure in Redis

2. MultiRedis - Because One Redis Isn’t Enough (my talk at Redis Day Tel Aviv 2018)

3. Rust turns three

4. TiDB 2.0 (open-source distributed scalable Hybrid Transactional and Analytical Processing database)

5. The creator of Ruby says "We will do everything to survive"

6. Why Crystal is the most promising programming language of 2018

7. vim-polyglot - a solid language pack for Vim

8. Timber.io - Log Better
9. Elixircards - Flashcards to help you master Elixir

10. Rich Hickey talks

Read it or Throw it #202

1. AppSignal: Error tracking and performance insights for Ruby and Elixir

2. Apache Arrow - A cross-language development platform for in-memory data

3. Elixir on Google Cloud Platform

4. InfluxData Raises $35M to Accelerate Growth and Meet Global Demand

5. MongoDB gets support for multi-document ACID transactions

6. Announcing log processing and analytics in Datadog

7. UNLINK: Speed Up Your Applications (Redis Labs)

8. What are the differences between Rust's `String` and `str`? (Stack Overflow)

9. Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

10. Book recommendations in the test of time (Ayende)

Read it or Throw it #201

1. Ruby 2.5.0 Released

2. Rust to the rescue (of Ruby)

3. Helix: Native Ruby Extensions Without Fear

4. A primer on Elixir Stream

5. fzf: A command-line fuzzy finder

6. ale: Asynchronous Lint Engine for vim

7. How Asana Creates a Great Developer Environment

8. The Blog Post on Monitoring an Apache Kafka Deployment to End Most Blog Posts 

9. Recommended Video: Event Sourcing is actually just functional code (by Greg Young)

10. Recommended Book: Blockchain Basics

The best way to predict your future is to create it

Abraham Lincoln