Tags: web-review, frontend, presentation, amd, ci, design, social-media, twitter, surveillance, security, architecture, trust, data-oriented, memory, databases, video, fediverse, type-systems, law, editor, system, multithreading, framework, messaging, c++, search, 3d, copyright, complexity, web, vim, python, community, go, linux, gaming, cost, ai, self-hosting, knowledge, product-management, writing, performance, politics, kernel, protocols, blog, postgresql, autonomy, hardware, cpu, business, foss, vector, life, programming, api, vision, remote-working, ux, tests, hiring, gpt, graphics, distributed, expertise, queuing, optimization, google, information, habits, organization, learning, codereview, tech, project-management, legal, http, management, webgpu, unicode, language, encodings, microsoft, emotions, gdpr, browser, maintenance, note-taking
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-30… You remember I “took a break”? Well, I did kind of. I confess I checked things from time to time. And that’s how we end up with a month worth of content.
Let’s have the July Mega-Compilation this week! I also inserted a couple of very old articles I had on the side (I’ll try to do this a bit more often). Since it’s really big, I added sections this time to group things a bit better. Hopefully this will make things easier to navigate.
Tags: tech, google, surveillance, browser
Let’s hope this doesn’t get any sort of adoption… that said seeing the amount of people using mostly Chrome and Google services, they can pretty much do as they wish.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/07/googles-web-integrity-api-sounds-like-drm-for-the-web/
Tags: tech, google, surveillance, browser
More details and analysis about the events unfolding around the Google “Web Environment Integrity” proposal. This still doesn’t bode well. Whatever they claim it seems clear it’s about getting rid of ad-blockers.
https://interpeer.io/blog/2023/07/google-vs-the-open-web/
Tags: tech, google, surveillance, browser, microsoft, trust
I was indeed thinking this looks awfully similar to some things we’ve seen in the past… It needs to be fought as well.
https://www.neelc.org/posts/google-webauth-palladium/
Tags: tech, gaming, politics
Repeat after me: “there is no link between video games and violent crimes”.
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/07/1186316124/france-riots-macron-video-games
Tags: tech, law, gdpr, google, surveillance
This is a welcome consequence of the CJUE ruling. Be warned, think twice before reaching for Google Analytics.
https://www.imy.se/en/news/companies-must-stop-using-google-analytics/
Tags: tech, ai, gpt, law, copyright
It’ll be interesting to see where this complaint goes.
Tags: tech, security, social-media, twitter, fediverse
Looks like infosec people jumped out of the Twitter debacle. Good for them and welcome on the fediverse (looks like most of them moved there).
https://www.cyentia.com/the-death-of-infosec-twitter/
Tags: tech, cpu, amd, linux, foss, gaming
Looks like AMD’s strategy is paying off in the Linux world.
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-CPU-Linux-Gaming-67p
Tags: tech, linux
Looks like SUSE is attempting to take the high road after the RHEL debacle. We’ll see where this goes.
https://www.suse.com/news/SUSE-Preserves-Choice-in-Enterprise-Linux/
Tags: tech, blog, fediverse, self-hosting
It’s definitely tempting me to switch my blog comments to the fediverse as well.
https://cassidyjames.com/blog/fediverse-blog-comments-mastodon/
Tags: tech, complexity, self-hosting
Hosting applications can be cheap and simple. You need to cater to complexity and mind your dependencies.
https://blog.wesleyac.com/posts/how-i-run-my-servers
Tags: tech, databases, postgresql
Interesting proof of concept. I wonder how far this will go. There is definitely a need in any case.
https://fabianlindfors.se/blog/schema-migrations-in-postgres-using-reshape/
Tags: tech, postgresql, search
Yet another article on how you can do search straight in PostgreSQL. This one goes a bit further in how to put the pieces together though.
https://xata.io/blog/postgres-full-text-search-engine
Tags: tech, vector, postgresql, databases
Looks like an interesting extension for Postgres to do vector similarity searches inside the database.
https://neon.tech/blog/pg-embedding-extension-for-vector-search
Tags: tech, distributed, queuing
Neat way to see how several queuing strategies behave. Picking the right one for your system is important.
Tags: tech, messaging
There’s a new player in the message queue space. This one looks interesting.
https://bloomberg.github.io/blazingmq/
Tags: tech, foss, legal
Looks like an interesting Free Software alternative for digital documents signing.
Tags: tech, editor, vim
This is a good resource to learn Vim or if you want to get better at it.
https://thevaluable.dev/vim-commands-beginner/
Tags: tech, design, ux
Black has been getting too much of a bad reputation in the last few years. This article makes a good job arguing for a more balanced view.
https://toast.al/posts/visuallayout/2023-07-06_be-open-to-black
Tags: tech, 3d, graphics, webgpu, c++
It looks more and more like WebGPU will be the cross-platform graphics API we’ve been waiting for. Vulkan didn’t end up in this position but WebGPU seems to get there.
https://developer.chrome.com/en/blog/webgpu-cross-platform/
Tags: tech, web, frontend, framework, architecture
I think this is the right way to look at the problem space. The analysis provides the right pros and cons to look at when picking a frontend framework.
https://themer.dev/blog/the-single-most-important-factor-that-differentiates-front-end-frameworks
Tags: tech, encodings, unicode
An excellent explanation of the Unicode standard, complete with a bit of history. This is a good resource.
https://mcilloni.ovh/2023/07/23/unicode-is-hard/
Tags: tech, http, api
Interesting list of advises. Most of it makes sense, I’m less convinced about avoiding the headers for the authentication mechanism though.
https://jcs.org/2023/07/12/api
Tags: tech, protocols, http
It’s unclear what really drove the adoption this far. Still, it’s clearly the default option in many cases.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/tech/HTTPUniversalDefaultProtocol
Tags: tech, video, protocols
Interesting dive into the DisplayPort protocol and its advantages, looking forward to the next article in this series.
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/11/displayport-a-better-video-interface/
Tags: tech, programming, language, expertise
I mostly agree with this. I’d just complete it a bit: it’s probably a good idea to have at least one language where you went really deep in (emphasis on at least). A kind of strategy to aim at “T shaped skills” (or better “paint drip shaped skills”).
https://medium.com/@jankammerath/the-advantages-of-a-polyglot-programmer-a2af29c7cb50
Tags: tech, programming
Wise words. This is overall a good approach to add new components and behaviors to a system.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20230725-00/?p=108482
Tags: tech, foss, community, codereview
I’m not necessarily convinced this is as much a silver bullet as it is presented here. Still there are benefits to such a structured approach for reviews in community projects.
https://sage.thesharps.us/2014/09/01/the-gentle-art-of-patch-review/
Tags: tech, complexity, maintenance
A bit sarcastic, but makes its point efficiently. It’s important to realize that more code to maintain is definitely not what we need.
https://www.dancowell.com/software-engineers-hate-code/
Tags: tech, ci, cost
This often overlooked indeed… and to make it worse it can be hard to optimize.
https://www.softwareatscale.dev/p/quadratic-ci-cost-growth
Tags: tech, programming, go, type-systems
Interesting update. Looks like Go is making progress at its own pace and tries to stay small.
https://blog.carlmjohnson.net/post/2023/ten-years-of-go-good-bad-meh/
Tags: tech, hardware, cpu, kernel, system
Can’t say I learned much but that was a very neat refresher. It’s very well done, so if you never dabbled in the basics of how the hardware or the kernel work I strongly recommend reading it.
Tags: tech, data-oriented, programming, performance, optimization
Interesting optimization on this somewhat common data structure.
https://zeux.io/2023/06/30/efficient-jagged-arrays/
Tags: tech, multithreading
This apparently needs to be reminded from time to time. So here it is: don’t expect those timestamps to be unique, even on a single machine.
https://www.evanjones.ca/nanosecond-collisions.html
Tags: tech, tests
This is about behavior and not structure indeed. Put the focus at the right place otherwise your tests will quickly become expensive to update.
https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/what-is-a-unit-test-the-answer-might-surprise-you
Tags: tech, tests
In praise of property based testing. This definitely completes well the tests you write by hand.
https://concerningquality.com/generated-tests/
Tags: tech, tests
Where does this style of tests shine? A few elements to consider.
https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/snapshot-testing
Tags: tech, tests
Calls a bit too much everything mocks while the term test double would have done the job. Still it stresses fairly well the importance of being as close to reality as possible and the tradeoffs we have to make.
https://borretti.me/article/test-against-reality
Tags: tech, python, tests
A little article which serves as a good introduction to the pytest fixtures. They are indeed very useful I think.
https://www.revsys.com/tidbits/pytest-fixtures-are-magic/
Tags: tech, hiring, remote-working, business
Remote work is clearly the best way for smaller companies to compete to attract talent. This greatly increases the size of the pool of potential hires.
https://www.vox.com/technology/2023/6/20/23762655/tech-perk-remote-work-freedom-airbnb-yelp
Tags: tech, architecture, product-management, project-management, organization
Nice little article about Conway’s Law. Shows nicely all the ramifications it has.
https://registerspill.thorstenball.com/p/the-most-powerful-law-in-software
Tags: management, autonomy
Too often managers loose track of the level of autonomy achieved by the people around them. It’s important to gauge this properly though. Too much or too little guidance and prodding can lead to frustration.
https://jchyip.medium.com/the-ladder-of-leadership-and-facilitating-change-8d2a705795f9
Tags: management, autonomy, vision
Good explanations about why autonomy without alignment is problematic. There are tips I should mull over in there, this can probably lead to some improvements at some places I’ve seen.
https://buildrightside.com/autonomy-alignment
Tags: management, knowledge
Interesting alternative to the “T-shaped skills” metaphor.
https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/paint-drip-people
Tags: habits
Habits indeed cut both ways…
https://awesomekling.github.io/Excellence-is-a-habit-but-so-is-failure/
Tags: emotions, life
Clearly the book referenced here picked my interest, I guess I’ll try to read it. The cheat sheet proposed here is interesting, not completely sure how I’d act on it in practice though.
https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/emotions-a-code-book
Tags: tech, blog, writing
All the good reasons to have a blog. This is why I keep maintaining mine.
https://www.alexmolas.com/2023/07/15/nobody-cares-about-your-blog.html
Tags: tech, note-taking, information, knowledge, learning
Very nice article. We must not loose from sight that actual learning requires some sort of effort. Even better when it’s coupled to using your hands (definitely why I still take notes written by hands for some things).
https://giansegato.com/essays/edutainment-is-not-learning
Tags: memory, learning, presentation
This is an interesting idea, I think I’ll try it to see how it impacts my memory.
https://math.stanford.edu/~vakil/threethings.html
Hope you enjoyed it, if you made it this far… congrats!
Bye for now!