Issue #70
Curated list of blogs, videos, papers, podcasts on programming and distributed systems.
"A Man is but a product of his thoughts. What he thinks, he becomes."
- Mahatma Gandhi
Posts
Testing Microservices, the sane way
This post, focuses solely on testing backend services and not desktop software or safety critical systems or GUI tools or frontend applications and what have you. - #medium
25 Experts Share Their Tips for building Scalable Web Application
How do you build Scalable Web Apps that users not only love but come over & over again? We’ve pulled together tips from 25+ experts all over the web so that you can make sure they’re using the best of Web Scalability tips without failure. Here's what some of them had to say. -#simform
How I Future-Proofed My Tech Stack
Start simple, but don't ever sacrifice your ability to scale.
API-First — Computing infrastructure, data, and business logic should be abstracted into a back end and provisioned via a single, dynamic API.
Elasticity — Computing infrastructure should be made available as a fully elastic service to a running application.
Front-end flexibility — Software is more art than science these days as companies express themselves technologically to their customers. Builders must be able to design and build user interfaces in any style and across a myriad of form factors. - #indiehackers
Text Rendering Hates You
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text "perfectly". It's all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others. - #gankra #github
Starship Update
SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle is a fully, rapidly reusable transportation system designed to carry both crew and cargo to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and anywhere else in the solar system. On Saturday, September 28 at our launch facility in Cameron County, Texas, SpaceX Chief Engineer and CEO Elon Musk provided an update on the design and development of Starship. - #spacex
Scaling the Hotstar Platform for 50M
Hotstar is the home of Indian cricket and scale. However, it’s not rocket science, we did use some rocket metaphors! While we covered first principles earlier, this time around we talk about rockets and going even beyond. What does it take to be ready for 50M? - #blog #hotstar
A developer goes to a DevOps conference
I went to DevOpsDays thinking DevOps means developers and operations merged into one team. I was wrong. - #darkcoding
Why you should learn just a little Awk
Knowing 10% of awk's already small syntax, which you can pick up in just a few minutes, will dramatically increase your ability to quickly manipulate data in text files. - #gregable
Reinventing the Network Stack for Compute-Intensive Applications
DARPA seeks to create new networking approaches to accelerate distributed application performance by 100x - #darpa
Building Reliable Reprocessing and Dead Letter Queues with Apache Kafka
Uber Insurance Engineering team extended Kafka’s role in our existing event-driven architecture by using non-blocking request reprocessing and dead letter queues (DLQ) to achieve decoupled, observable error-handling without disrupting real-time traffic. This strategy helps our opt-in Driver Injury Protection program run reliably in more than 200 cities, deducting per-mile premiums per trip for enrolled drivers. - #eng #uber
Processing 40 TB of code from ~10 million projects with a dedicated server and Go for $100
It took about 5 weeks to download and run scc over the collection of repositories saving all of the data. It took just over 49 hours to crunch the 1 TB of JSON and produce the results. -#boyter
Ask HN: Who Wants to Be Fired?
Each of us have limits as to the things we're willing to put up with at a job. What's taking you near your threshold? - #news #ycombinator
hard-comp-fi-fiction-list
This resource lists a bunch of stories which in some way, explore the beautiful ideas behind computer science, software engineering and even plain old programming. - #fiftysevendegreesofrad
Strategies for Long Projects
I want to encourage myself and anyone reading this to keep trying things that are hard and take a long time. It will be tempting to quit, but overcoming that temptation could be the best decision you ever make. - #benbrostoff #github
New In PostgreSQL 12: Generated Columns
PostgreSQL 12 comes with a new feature called generated columns. Other popular RDBMSes already support generated columns as “computed columns” or “virtual columns.” With Postgres 12, you can now use it in PostgreSQL as well. - #pgdash
We Are All Confident Idiots
The trouble with ignorance is that it feels so much like expertise. A leading researcher on the psychology of human wrongness sets us straight. - #psmag
Must read
The Single Most Important Internal Email in the History of Amazon
A good internal design communication system is one of the most important leverages an organization can have to make an impact. - #sametab
Stevey's Google Platforms Rant
Google vs Amazon - #gist #github
Books
The science of functional programming - by Sergei Winitzki
The goal of this book is to teach programmers how to reason mathematically about types and code, in a way that is directly relevant to software practice.
The material is presented at medium to advanced level. Readers will need to learn difficult concepts through prolonged mental concentration and effort. The book requires a certain amount of mathematical experience, at the level of familiarity with high-school algebra. - #winitzki #github
Fundamentals of Programming Python - Richard L. Halterman
#python #cs #southern
Videos
Orchestrating Robot Swarms with Java
Matthew Cornford looks at the evolution of Ocado’s automated warehouses and highlights how Java has helped them overcome a number of challenges. He focuses on their latest generation of highly automated warehouses and looks into Java’s role for orchestrating huge swarms of robots for superior efficiencies of scale. He explores some of the benefits and challenges the use of Java has presented. - #infoq
Scaling Erlang Cluster to 10,000 Nodes
Maxim Fedorov demonstrates an example of a live Erlang cluster being scaled from just a few nodes to 10,000 machines with no service interruption. - #infoq
The Evolution of Spotify Home Architecture
Emily Samuels and Anil Muppalla discuss the evolution of Spotify's architecture that serves recommendations (playlist, albums, etc) on the Home Tab. - #infoq
Podcast
Domain Driven Design, Language and DevOps for Distributed Systems with CircleCI’s Rob Zuber
We have Rob Zuber, CTO from CircleCI on. A lot of the projects we work on implement CircleCI, so we were super excited to speak to Rob. We talk about his background and how he became part of CircleCI through an acquisition. We also get into one of his favorite topics: language. Particularly the words that are used in projects, and how important they are for workflow. We also discuss “Domain Driven Design,” or the idea that when creating a layer of functionality, to keep it bounded within its domain so other layers don’t creep into it. This was an engineering heavy episode that was a lot of fun. Hope you enjoy this one. - #podcasts #apple
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