Most Interesting (Not Only) Tech Reads In March
Historians on Ukraine, Logs versus Debuggers, History of Business Intelligence in 21 century, and more
I DO NOT BELIEVE IN DEBUGGERS
- python — What is the difference between str and repr? — Stack Overflow
- By necessity, I am wrapping my head around how to log well and the following section just stuck
Let me come right out and say it — I do not believe in debuggers. I don’t know how to use any debugger and have never used one seriously. Furthermore, I believe that the big fault in debuggers is their basic nature — most failures I debug happened a long long time ago, in a galaxy far far away. This means that I do believe, with religious fervor, in logging. Logging is the lifeblood of any decent fire-and-forget server system.
PLATFORMERS ABOUT PAGE
- About — Platformers
- A suprisingly succint, yet important
Although I’ve always tried to keep up with the latest in technology, I am a firm believer that the most important trait for success in the tech industry is the same as any other endeavor: recognizing and affirming the dignity of every human person I interact with.
- in line with the late Kent Beck’s talk asserting that Software design is an exercise in human relationships
CHOOSE JOY EVEN IN THE DARK AGES
- Essential Life-Learnings from 14 Years of Brain Pickings — The Marginalian
- Not tech, but it is increasingly difficult in March-2022 to keep calm and carry on without thinking about how to help Ukrainians and what one’s values are. So, this comes extremely timely to my attention
Choose joy. Choose it like a child chooses the shoe to put on the right foot, the crayon to paint a sky. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with the need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature.
ONE WAY SMART DEVELOPERS MAKE BAD STRATEGIC DECISIONS
- One Way Smart Developers Make Bad Strategic Decisions — Earthly Blog
- Another surprising integration of craft with other domains, this time a critique of top-down planning approach (waterfall, remember?) that we can see evolving not only in the world of software but in the economy or one personal budgeting (read Roll With The Punches)
CORMAC MCCARTHY NON-FICTION WRITING TIPS
- Novelist Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great science paper
- I had about a year in my twenties when I read nothing but Cormac McCarthy (Borders Trilogy, The Road and Blood Meridian)
- It came as a surprise that he recommends a minimal and clear style for writing scientific papers
Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember. This theme and these points form the single thread that runs through your piece. The words, sentences, paragraphs, and sections are the needlework that holds it together. If something isn’t needed to help the reader to understand the main theme, omit it
- If you want a counter-argument, always go for Dan Luu and read his Some thoughts on writing
THEY PREDICTED THE UKRAINE WAR. BUT DID THEY STILL GET IT WRONG?
- Opinion — They Predicted the Ukraine War. But Did They Still Get It Wrong? — The New York Times
- On a fascinating dynamics of predictions where the one that was right still gets described and loses authority
HISTORIAN STEPHEN KOTKIN ON INVASION
- A Scholar of Stalin Discusses Putin, Russia, Ukraine, and the West | The New Yorker
- Not only, but importantly on hubris within the Russian culture
Russia is a remarkable civilization: in the arts, music, literature, dance, film. In every sphere, it’s a profound, remarkable place — a whole civilization, more than just a country. At the same time, Russia feels that it has a “special place” in the world, a special mission. It’s Eastern Orthodox, not Western. And it wants to stand out as a great power. Its problem has always been not this sense of self or identity but the fact that its capabilities have never matched its aspirations. It’s always a struggle to live up to these aspirations, but it can’t because the West has always been more powerful.
- I am somewhat missing the humiliation part as outlined by Masha Gessen in Ezra Klein Interviews Masha Gessen — The New York Times
HISTORIAN TIMOTHY SNYDER ON UKRAINE
Ancient Greece got grain from Ukraine. In the 16th century, Poland effectively colonized Ukraine during the Age of Discovery and sold grain from Ukraine around the world for gold and silver that came from Latin America. In the 20th century, Stalin also colonized Ukraine. And he actually used that language…Hitler is looking at Ukraine as a breadbasket. Hitler is looking at Ukraine as the last best opportunity for the Germans to create a colonial system, which he sees as like that of other countries, but coming in later, coming in harder and allowing Germany to catch up and become a superpower like the British are like the Americans are from his point of view…So it’s all about Ukraine. The Second World War, in Europe at least, is all about Ukraine. If not for Ukraine, if not for that vision, which we under the heading of “Lebensraum,” there wouldn’t have been a war.
BOOKVINE.IO
- A project of a 13-year old boy assisted by his developer dad, listing 300 books listed per category. I am on the opposite side of the world and needed this, too for my kids.
- https://www.bookvine.io/
THE MODERN DATA STACK IN 2021
- The modern data stack in 2021
- My colleague Archit summarized 3 major technological breakthroughs of the early 21st century which enabled the universal use of business intelligence methodologies freed from the older constraints (large investment and huge compute demands)
- 2006 Apache Hadoop (distributed big data framework enabling horizontal scaling)
- 2006 AWS (cloud, no comment)
- 2012 Redshift (data warehouse in the cloud)
- Can be combined with Storm in the stratosphere: how the cloud will be reshuffled · Erik Bernhardsson which claims memorably
Redshift is a data warehouse (aka OLAP database) offered by AWS. Before Redshift, it was the dark ages. The main player was Teradata, which had an on-prem offering. Startups said no to SQL and used Hadoop — SQL was kind of lame back then, for reasons that in hindsight appear absurd. I’m very happy we’re out of this era. Anyway, one vendor was a company called ParAccel. AWS licensed its technology, rebranded it Redshift, and launched in 2012. Redshift at the time was the first data warehouse running in the cloud. It was a brilliant move by AWS because it immediately lowered the bar for a small company to start doing analytics. You didn’t have to set up any infrastructure yourself, or write custom MapReduce and reload the job tracker all day. You could spin up a Redshift cluster in AWS, feed it humongous amounts of data, and it would … sort of just work.
