27 / Speed matters

Hey, hope you’re well. Enjoy this weeks selection ✌🏻

Tweet of the Week

Want to get ahead in life? Start _genuinely_ rooting for others to succeed. It's as simple as that. — @sahilbloom

Favourites

• IoT Hacking and Rickrolling My High School District (whitehoodhacker.net)

  A story of a small team rickrolling their entire High School District (of over 11 thousand students).

• Speed matters (scattered-thoughts.net)

  Jamie Brandon writes that the most important thing to focus on improving is how fast you can work.

• How I got my startup to #1 on both Product Hunt and Hacker News by accident (levels.io)

  Pieter Levels about the NomadList project and its history.

Culture

• What is your labor worth? Tech compensation in 2021 (jacobian.org)

  Jacob Kaplan-Moss about tech compensation and how to find out if you’re underpaid.

• Growth vs. Efficiency (jayriverlong.github.io)

  Jay Riverlong on a trade-off that you can find everywhere.

• How to Evaluate Startup Offers (faingezicht.com)

  Avy Faingezicht has a beginners guide on startup offers (shares, cash, etc.).

Software Engineering

• Neural Networks from Scratch - an interactive guide (aegeorge42.github.io)

  Allison George created an interactive guide to learn Neural Networks.

• NixOS in the Cloud, step-by-step: part 1 (justinas.org)

  Justinas Stankevičius has a tutorial to set up NixOS on a Digital Ocean virtual machine. Make sure to check out part 2 as well!

Rust

• Rust and GCC, two different ways (lwn.net)

  Jonathan Corbet about the different approaches to use gcc as a Rust compiler (instead of the currently-supported LLVM).

• Making slow Rust code fast (patrickfreed.github.io)

  Patrick Freed explains how he improved the performance of his Rust crate, using benchmarks and flame graphs to find slow paths.

Cutting Room Floor

• The planet survived six hours without Facebook. Let's make it longer next time (theregister.com)

  Rupert Goodwins about the Facebook downtime and how Facebook has no essential service.

• Invisible asymptotes (eugenewei.com)

  Eugene Wei about invisible asymptotes (i.e. reasons for growth stagnation) at various Silicon Valley companies and how to detect them.

• Solar-powered aircraft flown for nearly three weeks without landing (eandt.theiet.org)

  Jack Loughran about the Airbus aircraft that could potentially stay airborne for up to six months.