Reading List on peanball.net

What I think about when I edit — Eva Parish

evaparish.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Sat, 06 Apr 2024 17:42:59 +0200

A good overview of what to look out for when writing, technical or otherwise.

The Parable of the Two Programmers

realmensch.org, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 21:38:27 +0100

Mastering Programming - by Kent Beck

tidyfirst.substack.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 19:53:47 +0100

Power of Small Optimizations

maksimkita.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Sat, 10 Feb 2024 10:19:57 +0100

A good guide to gain small and big wins.

Leading as the most experienced engineer in the room

leaddev.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Sat, 06 May 2023 19:09:25 +0200

An interesting view of how the world changes from solving problems to supporting others in solving problems.

What a good debugger can do

werat.dev, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Sat, 11 Mar 2023 02:10:51 +0100

There’s nothing more powerful than a developer with a good debugger and the knowledge of how to use it.

A Skeptic’s Guide to Software Architecture Decisions

www.infoq.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Mon, 16 Jan 2023 07:46:04 +0100

Admittedly, I’m often too positive on assumptions and not sceptical enough. This is a good article to help fix that or change the approach.

You Want Modules, Not Microservices

blogs.newardassociates.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Tue, 03 Jan 2023 15:37:52 +0100

Another article of why Microservices might not be the right solution to your problem.

The Perfect Commit

simonwillison.net, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 06:21:15 +0100

I aspire to at least have a pull request with those features.

Generous use of git rebase make it possible for very commit.

This requires some planning ahead and cleanup but makes reviews now or later so much easier.

Staff engineer archetypes

lethain.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 08:52:49 +0200

In my career I’ve been all these roles at one point or another, but at smaller sizes. My current role fits neatly into the Team Lead. There are aspirations for Architect though.

Benchmarking Caddy vs. Nginx

blog.tjll.net, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Fri, 16 Sep 2022 20:15:51 +0200

Some ways to get better at debugging

jvns.ca, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Tue, 30 Aug 2022 17:01:54 +0200

A short overview for strategies on how to get better at debugging.

In short:

know the code
know your tools
know yourself
know how to approach problems

Sharing Network Namespaces in Docker

blog.mikesir87.io, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Wed, 24 Aug 2022 14:38:13 +0200

A guide on how to share the network namespace with another container. This is how a Pod in Kubernetes contains multiple containers. If you’re not working with Kubernetes but e.g. with Docker or docker-compose, this works in the same way pretty much.

Uncommon Uses of Python in Commonly Used Libraries

eugeneyan.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Sat, 20 Aug 2022 14:04:43 +0200

I have complicated feelings about TDD • Buttondown

buttondown.email, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Thu, 18 Aug 2022 20:17:49 +0200

TDD often makes your design better!

My point is that it can also make your design worse. Some TDD is better than no TDD, but no TDD is better than excessive TDD. TDD is a method you use in conjunction with other methods. Sometimes you’ll listen to the methods and they’ll give conflicting advice. Sometimes, TDD’s advice will be right and sometimes it will be wrong. Sometimes it’ll be so wrong that you shouldn’t use TDD in that circumstance.

It’s one of many tools you have at your disposal, but like any of them it’s not the panacea that solves all your problems.

A script to fix EDID problems on external monitors in macOS

gist.github.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Wed, 17 Aug 2022 08:44:40 +0200

Finally I found the missing link to set up EDID overrides on Big Sur and later, where System Integrity Protection (SIP) is enabled.

In short, MacOS also takes overrides from the path /Library/Displays/Contents/Resources/Overrides, which is admin writable.

Introducing Ristretto: A High-Performance Go Cache - Dgraph Blog

dgraph.io, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Sun, 14 Aug 2022 22:26:53 +0200

You Don’t Need Microservices.

medium.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 06:40:10 +0200

Most companies and projects are by far not big enough to benefit from microservices, and not good enough to deal with the implications and repercussions. There’s a reason “distributed systems” are hard: it’s the next difficulty level after multi-threaded concurrency — harder to observe, harder to reason about.

How finishing what you start makes teams more productive and predictable

lucasfcosta.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 15:51:31 +0200

The aspect of “transaction cost” for doing a particular thing once or multiple times is interesting.

Starting a bunch of things in parallel will often lead to many being finished at a similar point in time, often all at once and leading to the dreaded ‘big bang integration’, which even in short sprints may be painful enough already.

That said, I love starting multiple things at once. Sometimes being ‘stuck’ on the same thing and not having some other outlet or diversion to put your mind to makes a task take longer. Having the ‘diversion’ often gives me more energy to breeze through the other task… and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s not scientific.

Richardson Maturity Model (for REST)

martinfowler.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 08:51:01 +0200

A follow-up to the question whether we do REST wrong that provides examples of what constitutes a fully RESTful service.

How Did REST Come To Mean The Opposite of REST?

htmx.org, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Tue, 19 Jul 2022 08:22:31 +0200

And here I thought I knew full well what RESTful APIs had to look like. The constraint in my head was that individual resources (e.g. items in a database) should have their own URL and you used the HTTP verbs (GET, POST, DELETE, etc.) correctly.

What was missing from that is the Hypermedia aspect, where each response defines the appropriate URLs for the possible next steps.

the wild web: Reckless Software Construction

blog.sidstamm.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 09:30:13 +0200

“Be an engineer, not MacGyver.”

Giving a Shit as a Service - Allen Pike

allenpike.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Fri, 15 Jul 2022 07:09:42 +0200

Always work at a place where you and your colleagues give a shit about the product(s), the work, and the people around them.

How high capacity utilisation hurts a team's performance

lucasfcosta.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 11:31:08 +0200

An interesting look at how long lead times from idea to specification to implementation to release can cause waste in the software development process.

The Illustrated QUIC Connection: Every Byte Explained

quic.ulfheim.net, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Tue, 21 Jun 2022 05:11:31 -0400

A deep dive into the protocol powering HTTP/3 and others, implementing a lot of TCP and supporting encryption at all steps.

Go: The Complete Guide to Profiling Your Code

hackernoon.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 08:15:27 +0200

An excellent guide I found via Tim Bray’s blog ‘ongoing’ - Making Code Faster.

Data Race Patterns in Go

eng.uber.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Sat, 11 Jun 2022 07:51:16 +0200

At work I develop in Go and this is a good list of things to look out for and avoid.

eBPF, sidecars, and the future of the service mesh

buoyant.io, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Wed, 08 Jun 2022 07:06:18 +0200

I‘m learning about eBPF. It’s an absolutely fascinating technology.

Planning is For Doing

biggestfish.substack.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Sun, 05 Jun 2022 11:59:14 +0200

“The only purpose of a plan is to ensure better results, it has no value in itself. And as James wrote, we must know what to overlook, as sometimes it is better to have no plan at all.”

I value knowledge and being able to respond or adapt when it’s needed over obsessive planning of details that will be wrong the second you get to working on something. Many people are able to adapt and figure out the details for themselves — maybe not in the way you would but in a way that also works.

A broad strokes direction as “Plan” is very often useful, though, which is exactly “planning is for doing”.

maxgoedjen/secretive: Store SSH keys in the Secure Enclave

github.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Wed, 01 Jun 2022 07:07:35 +0200

Product vs. Feature Teams

www.svpg.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Mon, 30 May 2022 08:49:06 +0200

An interesting and apt breakdown of team types. I work in neither a product nor a feature team at the moment but am trying to add more product thinking into my own work and then my team’s.

Prometheus vs. InfluxDB: A Monitoring Comparison

logz.io, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Sun, 29 May 2022 18:05:38 +0200

Outputting only the match / capturing group with grep

unix.stackexchange.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Thu, 26 May 2022 09:22:12 +0200

Grep doesn’t handle capturing groups, but with lookaround you can match and exclude prefixes. This leaves you with the part of the pattern that you needed.

On rebooting: the unreasonable effectiveness of turning computers off and on again

keunwoo.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Wed, 25 May 2022 12:24:00 +0200

Getting back to a defined and known state is a great way to recover. I found the concept of ‘crash-only-software’ very interesting, and the described approach of inevitable improvement and resilience from software that rather crashes than being in an unknown state. If it keeps crashing and you depend on it, you will get to understanding and fixing the issues quicker.

A list of new(ish) command line tools

jvns.ca, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

TipBITS: Always Show Window Proxy Icons - TidBITS

tidbits.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 07:22:00 +0100

I use the macOS proxy icon all the time. For me it is one of the most useful features on day-to-day use of macOS. Having it available at all times, not after hovering and an animation is great.

Microservices: Why Are We Doing This?

michaeldehaan.substack.com, linked by Alexander Lais (peanball.net) — Wed, 23 Mar 2022 09:32:21 +0200

At work I help maintain a platform used for microservices. This article helps ask the question whether microservices are the right approach for that particular application or system at all.