What I Have Been Reading in 2021
JAN 2021
6 min readJan 5, 2022
Maximizing Developer Effectiveness
Rise of Worse Is Better
Intel Problems on Stratechery
- Intel Problems — Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- some big trends: intel did not share Microsoft's trajectory (Wintel, remember?), but almost — losing mobile, losing Apple keeping servers with google, kicking Sun away; but lost on manufacturing grounds….
Garbage in Garbage Out
- Common Sense 321 Garbage In, Garbage Out
- Politics, some historical insights into the insemination of conspiracies in the past and now
What happens when you update your DNS?
- What happens when you update your DNS?
- Awesome insights into the distinctino of recursive/authoritative DNS servers and the evolution of the process of an update of a DNS record (both within a zonefile and NS records themselves)
The documentation system
- The documentation system — Documentation system documentation
- Formal (Genre) analysis of technical writings that really opens eyes and is an instant classic and inspiration for own doc-templating and composition
FEB 2021
On Jeff Bezos and Amazon Model on Stratechery
- The Relentless Jeff Bezos — Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- Working on AWS a lot, it seems at least interesting to see that it is the head of AWS that got the CEO job after Jeff Bezos stepped down.
- Love reading Ben Thompson for his sense of history, it’s always interesting
Production Oriented Development
- Production Oriented Development by Paul Osman @ Medium
- the essay I have been returning to the most this year
- I can’t say I agree 100%, but it does resonate with so many references
- Bradshaw and Homecoming
- Pressfield and War of Art
- Seth’s Godin on regular shipping
- Also, I spend way too much time in non-prod mode (learning or procrastinating)
MAR 2021
Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male by Philip G. Zimbardo
JUNE 2021
Beauty Is Our Business
- Beauty Is Our Business
- Beauty is more important in computing than anywhere else in technology because software is so complicated. Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.
Always be quitting
- Always be quitting — jmmv.dev
- summary: document, document, document, learn, learn, learn, train, delegate
Finish your stuff
- Finish your stuff
- contemplate functional completion as an ideal state, being done and letting it just work for years
As We May Think
- As We May Think — The Atlantic
- prophecy about technology enabling knowledge work
- but the difficult part now is the assembly and the workflow
On the Dynamo and Email
- On the Dynamo and Email — Cal Newport
- great update to As We May Think — dynamo was there for decades before its potential has been unlocked
JULY 2021
Excel Never Dies
- Excel Never Dies — Not Boring by Packy McCormick
- wonderful defense of boring technology with many enemies
It’s OK to Only Program for a Paycheck
- Passion Not Required: It’s OK to Only Program for a Paycheck
- remembered this one after months of reading, putting it here for this very reason
Planning is a software engineering value destroying mistake
Programming (one programmer working alone without too much money/time pressure imposed by others) is quiet different from software engineering (multiple programmers, stakeholders, designers, etc., with time and money constraints). Everyone loves programming (and so doing programming usually leads to high-quality and useful products), almost everyone hates software engineering. — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28086673
AUG 2021
Hammock Driven Development
- Hammock Driven Development — Rich Hickey
- Intriguing praise of contemplation/slowdown applied for software engineering
SEP 2021
Write Code Not Much Mostly Functions
- Write code. Not too much. Mostly functions — Brandon’s Website
- Coming to mind when learning about nonlocal statements in Python in SICP for Python
It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
- It doesn’t take much public creativity to stand out as a job candidate
- Making me start using visuals all over the place again (I went to the text-only mode for efficiency reasons for some time)
If it will matter after today, stop talking about it in the chat room
- If it will matter after today, stop talking about it in a chat room — Mike Crittenden
- … but I still use the Copy link in Slack and paste it to tickets way too often
Software should convey a sense of calm
- Stay Calm and Learn This
- Too abstract and high-level for my taste, but the opening paragraph got me
Dieter Rams’ principles of good design applied to software engineering
- dieter rams 10 applied to software
- enjoy the equation in the last sentence, stressing to write as little software as possible
done = without_defects + fulfilled_requirement + fitting_purposeImprove Your Life with Long Error Messages
- Improve Your Life with Long Error Messages
- Clearly resonating with the brilliant Reading postmortems
On the relationship between exception handling and post-release defects
The longer the exception handling blocks in a file, the more likely the file is to contain bugs. What’s more, the length of the file and the length of its exception handling blocks aren’t correlated, so exception handler length really does contain novel information.
OCT-2021
The inflation of the term Best Practices
- Best Practices (why I Hate Them)+
- Thinking properly about the language, somewhere in the Orwellian tradition, but also SICP stress of using appropriate languages in engineering comes to mind
What to Learn
- What to learn — Dan Luu
- An intriguing defense of hedgehog mentality in the dualism of The Hedgehog and the Fox
Productivity and Velocity
- Some reasons to work on productivity and velocity
- Dan is making me sharpen my typing skills with this
Bash functions are better than I thought
- Bash functions are better than I thought
- More Importantly, the following HN discussion thread
NOV-2021
Microsoft and the Metaverse
- Microsoft and the Metaverse — Stratechery by Ben Thompson
- A great example of changing one’s mind and an interesting argument of why VR should matter besides psychotherapy (gaming and porn are self-evident sad stories)
python — Relative imports for the umpteenth time — Stack Overflow
- python — Relative imports for the umpteenth time — Stack Overflow
- Actually reading the thread and finding great technical explanations
Linus on Linebreaks
- LKML: Linus Torvalds: Re: clean up kernel_{read,write} & friends v2
- and the accompanying HN thread with bullet points from one contributor that sounds like an excerpt a Letter to a Young Developer — taking this to heart
My mind is blown on an almost daily basis when some of our junior developers shares their screen with me. Two of them consistently have: 1. horizontal task bar; 2. display scaling set to 125% or worse (1080 native) 3. a terminal launched from VSCode (whaaaaaaaaaat) they leave on the bottom…
DEC-2021
Three Steps to the Future
- Presentations — Benedict Evans
- More than the content itself, a great example of presentation aesthetics, something I believe Seth Godin recommends in both
- Really Bad Powerpoint, 2007
- Words on slides, 2018
0-Day (Computing)
- Zero-day (computing) — Wikipedia
- Related to Log4Shell: RCE 0-day exploit found in log4j2, a popular Java logging package; experiencing and watching wide security vulnerability incident, something I only heard of up until this point
Some Thoughts on Writing
- Some thoughts on writing — Dan Luu
- As always, a great contrarian journey into the weeds of the style of technical blogging.
- I would agree that write as I write could be bad advice — however, I believe that you do learn by copying (Bach used to re-write whole compositions of other composers); as for writing I believe that finding your authentic voice is (for me) helped by finding texts that feel as if they were written for me (like Dan’s blog!); then I intentionally (steal) or unintentionally (mimic) it
Culture Matters
- Culture matters — Dan Luu
- In other words:
But one of the things that Cambridge could do and later Bell Labs could do is somehow raise people’s expectations of themselves. Raise the level that’s considered acceptable. You walk in and you see what people are doing, you see how people are doing it, you see how apparently easily they do it, you see how nice they are while doing it, and you realize, “I better sharpen up my game.” You have to get better because what is acceptable has changed. Some organizations can do that but most can’t to that extent. I’ve just been very, very lucky to be in a couple of places that actually can increase your level of ambition and the level of what is a good standard.
