Read it or Throw it #210

1. No, the problem isn’t “bad coders”

A well-written article talking about the importance of having programming languages that will guard us the developers from as many mistakes as possible.

After all, we're humans and humans make mistakes.

Also, projects assumptions change over time.

Good tools and good programming languages can assist much. Give Rust a try!

2. Compounding Knowledge

A short summary for The Snowball book talking about Warren Buffett knowledge consumption and prioritization methods and how his life-long learning helped him in business

3. Solving git merge conflicts with VIM

A very cool technique to resolve git merge conflicts in vim using vim-fugitive and good shortcuts

4. A brief history of Erlang and Elixir

I think this is one of the most inspiring stories in the history of Software.

Who would think that Erlang, developed in the '80s for the telecommunication industry in Ericsson

will serve so well high-scale internet systems 30 years after?

5. WebAssembly: How and why (LogRocket)

An introductory article covering the basics of WebAssembly with nice illustrations

6. 74 Best OS X (Mac OS) Apps You Need

If you're a Mac user, go over the list. You'll probably find something useful

7. Git History

A cool extension for traversing a file evolution in a GitHub/GitLab

8. How Does Mozilla Firefox Make Money?

This article goes over different businesses models of Mozzila over time.

It's unintuitive that Mozilla makes money thanks to other browsers

9. Funny: Windows 95 Launch

Just watch these 24 seconds

10. Recommended Book: Programming Rust

If you want to learn Rust, then I highly recommend this book.

It's a more advanced book than the official The Rust Programming Language book

so you may want to that first

"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Tony Hoare

Read it or Throw it #209

1. Ruby 2.6.0 Released

A very big milestone towards the anticipated future of Ruby 3.

Ruby 2.6 brings a JIT-compilation to its front and it'll continue to evolve in future versions

2. Confluent Raises a $125M Series D Funding Round

Confluent - founded by the original authors of Kafka are having hyper growth.

I hope that using their service will become a commodity 

3. InfluxDB 2.0 Alpha Release and the Road Ahead

The company behind InfluxDB don't stop delivering new goods.

I didn't take the time yet to examine the new flux language they are building,

but I'm sure they know what they are doing and that it'll become popular

4. Kite raises $17M for its AI-driven code completion tool

Machine Learning on Code has a huge potential and this tool is just one example for that.

I'm very curious to see how it'll work on other programming languages besides Python 

5. New year, new GitHub: Announcing unlimited free private repos

GitHub, now backed by Microsoft breaks their rules in order to attract more users interest 

as part of the competition against GitLab, Bitbucket, and others

6. Microsoft acquires Citus Data, re-affirming its commitment to Open Source and accelerating Azure PostgreSQL performance and scale

A very big move of Microsoft which puts her in the top of the game of Distributed Relational Database offered as SaaS

7. Enjoy a slice of QUIC, and Rust!

Cloudflare has early support for QUIC (a.k.a HTTP3) and it's in Rust! (and Open-Source)

8. Ultralearning Environments: Why Where You Learn Determines How Much You Learn - Scott H Young

A fascinating article about the importance of witnessing others in order to up our game.

Thanks to the internet and platforms like YouTube, Twitch, this technique is approachable to anyone

9. What are Binaural Beats and how they work?

A simple explanation of the idea behind Binaural Beats

10. Kantega - The Mysterious Life of Developers (YouTube)

A very short (less than 3 minutes) National Geographic-like screencast about an animal called The Developer :)

The more you know, the more you know you don't know

Aristotle

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