Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-13.


The Twitter API is now effectively unmaintained | snarfed.org

Tags: tech, fediverse, twitter

Twitter continues its slow death… That likely explains why the Mastodon to Twitter bridge I’m using has become so unreliable. I’ll just keep ignoring it I guess.

https://snarfed.org/the-twitter-api-is-now-effectively-unmaintained


Cerebras-GPT: A Family of Open, Compute-efficient, Large Language Models - Cerebras

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, foss

Clearly aims to demonstrate the superiority of their specialized hardware for training. That said it’s nice to have proper open models available (architecture, training data, weights… it’s all in the open).

https://www.cerebras.net/blog/cerebras-gpt-a-family-of-open-compute-efficient-large-language-models/


What is the origin of model-view-controller? - Quora

Tags: tech, architecture, design, history

Nice historical perspective from Alan Kay about the MVC architecture pattern.

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-model-view-controller


Biscuit authorization

Tags: tech, cryptography, security

This looks like an interesting new authorization scheme.

https://www.biscuitsec.org/


Making Python 100x faster with less than 100 lines of Rust

Tags: tech, rust, python, profiling, performance

Nice walk through for a use of PyO3 to make some Python code much faster. Nice to see how useful py-spy turn out to be in such scenarii as well.

https://ohadravid.github.io/posts/2023-03-rusty-python/


Make your own Optionals

Tags: tech, programming, java, type-systems

There are nice mechanism in the Java type system nowadays to no rely on Optional all the time. This is a good reminder of the main alternative.

https://mccue.dev/pages/3-28-23-custom-optional


The Ambiguous Zone - Ben Northrop

Tags: tech, team, craftsmanship, organization

We might start in a software career attracted by the “perfection of the machines” (already debatable) but indeed to make anything meaningful we need to interact with other people. I often say it but I’ll say it again: it is a team sport.

https://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2023/the-ambiguous-zone.php


Why Engineers Need To Write - by Ryan Peterman

Tags: tech, craftsmanship, writing, remote-working

Indeed, this is the most important skill we need next to coding. Especially in a remote work culture.

https://www.developing.dev/p/why-engineers-need-to-write


The Definition of Senior: A Look at the expectations for Software Engineers

Tags: tech, career, management, leadership, engineering

Nice (even though a bit long) explanation of the skills needed for a senior software engineers. Definitely a bunch of good advises in there.

https://loige.co/the-senior-dev/


Incompetent but Nice - Jacob Kaplan-Moss

Tags: management

Note it’s not about impostor syndrome, I guess lots of us think we’re in this category, that doesn’t make it real.

Anyway, from the management point of view this is indeed a baffling situation when you encounter someone like this. What to do? Definitely not always easy, sometimes induced by the organization as well so it would be too easy to blame on the person alone. We need to pay more attention to those and there’s clearly no magical recipe to handle them.

https://jacobian.org/2023/mar/28/incompetent-but-nice/


The age of average — Alex Murrell

Tags: culture, architecture, design

This is indeed a phenomenon which I find odd. Everywhere you look, culture seems like it became homogeneous… I don’t like this much, but indeed it means it’s easy to be distinctive if you want to.

https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average


Bicycle – Bartosz Ciechanowski

Tags: science, physics, bike

Once again an excellent deep dive… We’re getting into the physics of biking, and there are some surprises along the way! In any case this is fascinating all the thinking which went into such an object, the wheels alone are a very clever system.

https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/


Treat your to-read pile like a river | Oliver Burkeman

Tags: culture, productivity

Good advice to fight against FOMO as far as reading material is concerned… just pluck things as they pass by. There’s so much content there’s likely redundancy anyway, hopefully. Yeah… I’m not cured.

https://www.oliverburkeman.com/river



Bye for now!