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, 6 min) — 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, 1 min) — 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, 31 min) — 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, 6 min) — 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, 3 min) — Luca Cipriani about being opinionated vs. holding back.
• Will Nix Overtake Docker? (blog.replit.com, 6 min) — Connor Brewster compares Nix and Docker and explains each system’s advantages.

Software Engineering

• Rusty Typestates - Starting Out (rustype.github.io, 6 min) — 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, 6 min) — 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, 8 min) — 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, 7 min) — Nicole Zhu shows three examples of zero-knowledge proofs.
• Don’t Make My Mistakes: Common Infrastructure Errors I’ve Made (matduggan.com, 9 min) — Mathew Duggan shares 6 mistakes he did in infrastructure and what you should do instead.
• 4x smaller, 50x faster (blog.asciinema.org, 4 min) — 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, 22 min) — 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, 7 min) — 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, 2 min) — 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, 7 min) — Edward Snowden about private-sector “criminal services” (like NSO).
• Instagram is Facebook now (embedded.substack.com, 2 min) — 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, 22 min) — 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, 28 min) — Ed Caesar tells the story how he spent three days of his vacation alone in the wilderness without a mobile phone.

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