Weekly Roundup: 2024-04-01
Readings
Glory Is 11MB/Sec Away
Amount completed: 100%
This blog post was a nice little breakdown “from first principles” of how most “cloud computing” offerings are unnecessary for most businesses. It confirmed my existing biases, which means I enjoyed it. A little snarky at times, though.
Why CockroachDB Doesn’t Use EvalPlanQual
Amount completed: 2%
A guy I like on Twitter, who posts things about distributed databases and what makes them tick, posted this link. I made it roughly 1 paragraph in before I realized I was not going to understand almost any of it.
Things That Don’t Work
Amount completed: 100%
A nice blog post. Here’s what I enjoyed from it:
- The author notes that “tree-based knowledge management systems don’t work,” and also “graph-based knowledge management systems don’t work.” This has been my own experience with these systems, for the most part. I am somewhat optimistic that the overhead that made these approaches painful/infeasible before could be reduced significantly by LLMs/embeddings. We’ll see.
- The ending was very sweet. A list of things that do work.
Logic Blocks • Docs • Svelte
Amount completed: 9%
I’m going back and reading the Svelte docs to solidify my knowledge of the framework. I have been using Svelte for a while, but was in kind of a “quick and dirty, let’s get moving” mindset when I started. I have enjoyed the framework very much and consider it very good and thus, worth actually investing in. I documented my progress, so far, in some other posts.
This particular article did make me realize that I still have a very weak grasp on what actually happens with server-side rendering in Svelte. The node server for the frontend kind of breaks my model of what an SPA frontend is, and I’ve mostly just ignored it so far (without much issue tbh). But that’ll be something worth digging into.
How and Why to Be Ladylike (For Women With Autism)
Amount completed: 100%
I mildly enjoyed this. Nothing really revolutionary in it, but an interesting title. I did enjoy that I was able to listen to this article via a computer voice in the Readwise Reader app. Really nice to have internet articles read to me while I’m working out or doing chores or whatever. Really brings Internet articles on the level with audiobooks and podcasts, though limitations remain.
Behind The Scenes on Aws Contributions to Open Source Databases
Amount completed: 100%
This article was just meh, but I also used it as a test bed for the “listen to this article” feature in the Readwise Reader app. Anyways, in light of Redis changing it’s license recently to be (essentially?) closed source, there was a lot of commentary on how big cloud providers just milk open source contributors for profit via hosting/selling the code. This was something I found by jumping around links shared in those convos. It’s a fine corporate blog post. It does seem like AWS contributes a good amount to things like Postgres these days. Good on them.
Governor Orders Transit Agency to Drop Bid to Charge Nyc Marathon $750k For Use of Verrazzano Bridge
Amount completed: 80%
Just fine. My dad sent this to me as part of his “the government is bad” stage of life. And yeah, it does seem like they were pretty bad here. Also, seems like this is some local news drama piece, and I don’t really put much stock in those folks to do a good job with an honest rendition of a narrative.
“I’m Scared”: Why It’s a Brutal Time to Be a Tv Writer
Amount completed: 100%
Good article if you want to hear harrowing career stories. As someone in my own job search, I suppose it was somewhat heartening to know that other people have it way worse.
One thing I did find interesting was this expression in the TV writing industry: “stay alive til 25.” As a computer boy who graduated college in the ZIRP era, this is a really foreign concept as something to tell young people in your industry. Just…sheesh. “Don’t die, kid!” I mean, not bad advice, but if that’s your advice, things aren’t going great.
Hunter S. Thompson’s Letter on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life
Amount completed: 100%
Had high hopes, but then it was just ok. Not a bad thing to read. But an HN commenter compared this to David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon Commencement, so my hopes were through the roof. DFW’s speech is my fave YouTube video of all time, for reference. This letter is nice. And I don’t think I really needed to go out of my way to read it.
Systems Performance
I started reading this canonical book on performance stuff from Brendan Gregg (of “shouting in the datacenter” fame). It seems solid. This, like the Cockroach DB article, came to my attention because of my systems/DBs Twitter friend (who I have also met bc he lives in New York!). Thing is, I have a good amount of other stuff going on, so I doubt I will have the consistency to get through this guy anytime soon.