34 / Inspiring Resilience

Hope you’re doing okay ✌🏻

Tweet of the Week

If you wondering what's Tech Twitter been up to lately. — @tweevtran

Favourites

• 100 years of whatever this will be (apenwarr.ca)

  apenwarr about distributed systems in the real world and how they all eventually go awry if they’re not regulated.

• I will pay you cash to delete your npm module (drewdevault.com)

  Drew DeVault will pay NPM maintainers cash to delete their module, the more weekly downloads the more cache. The idea is to disrupt and question the crazy JavaScript ecosystem.

• Surprise! Inspiring Resilience (youtu.be)

  Cory Watson looks at real-world resilience at the Navy, NASA and others to find inspiration for the tech sector.

Culture

• Pair Programming (jacobian.org)

  Jacob Kaplan-Moss wrote another part of his series on work sample tests and explains how to structure and evaluate pair-programming tests.

• Being Opinionated Is Good And Bad. (mastrolinux.medium.com)

  Luca Cipriani about being opinionated vs. holding back.

• Will Nix Overtake Docker? (blog.replit.com)

  Connor Brewster compares Nix and Docker and explains each system’s advantages.

Software Engineering

• Rusty Typestates - Starting Out (rustype.github.io)

  José Duarte explains Rust type states and why they’re so useful.

• Hubris and Humility (oxide.computer)

  Bryan Cantrill introduces an all-Rust system for embedded devices (Hubris) and a debugger for it (Humility).

• 42 things I learned from building a production database (maheshba.bitbucket.io)

  Mahesh Balakrishnan has a bunch of things to look out for when building a production database.

• Project Zero: This shouldn't have happened: A vulnerability postmortem (googleprojectzero.blogspot.com)

  Tavis Ormandy describes a vulnerability in Network Security Services that should’ve been discovered but wasn’t.

• Understanding Zero-knowledge proofs through illustrated examples (blog.goodaudience.com)

  Nicole Zhu shows three examples of zero-knowledge proofs.

• Don't Make My Mistakes: Common Infrastructure Errors I've Made (matduggan.com)

  Mathew Duggan shares 6 mistakes he did in infrastructure and what you should do instead.

• 4x smaller, 50x faster (blog.asciinema.org)

  Marcin Kulik tells a nice optimisation story how they massively sped up their web-player by replacing ClojureScript with Rust WASM + slim JavaScript framework.

Cutting Room Floor

• The Science of Mind Reading (newyorker.com)

  James Somers describes new ideas of “mind-reading” by looking at the brain area that activates.

• MacBook Air M1: the best laptop? (michael.stapelberg.ch)

  Michael Stapelberg has a different look on the MacBook Air M1 including things like Linux, Emacs and NEO keyboard layouts.

• LEGO has designed a set that can't be taken apart (brickset.com)

  Huw describes a part-combination used in the new AT-AT that can’t be taken apart without damaging parts.

• The Insecurity Industry (edwardsnowden.substack.com)

  Edward Snowden about private-sector “criminal services” (like NSO).

• Instagram is Facebook now (embedded.substack.com)

  Kate Lindsay and Nick Catucci talk about Instagrams recent changes in the algorithm and how it continues to become the next Boomer-Facebook.

• How Facebook and Google fund global misinformation (technologyreview.com)

  Karen Hao uncovers how Facebook and Google actively fund actors that publish dangerous fake-news via their ad network.

• The New Luxury Vacation: Being Dumped in the Middle of Nowhere (newyorker.com)

  Ed Caesar tells the story how he spent three days of his vacation alone in the wilderness without a mobile phone.