Bookmarks

A collection of links to articles, posts, videos etc. I find worth reading.

Software organizations

  • Total War: ROME II and Creative Assembly — My Statement Ten Years On (2024) by Julian McKinlay.
    Lack of communication, culture of blaming and switching the arrows, late decisions, making smoke and mirrors instead of real demos and assembling the final product at the very late product development stages - it has been and happening at Creative Assembly - the company behind Total War series. | #game #total-war #mismanagement #war-stories

Software engineering

  • Ruby vs Python comes down to the for loop (2021) by Doug Turnbull.
    An interesting viewpoint on how the very basic building blocks of Python and Ruby makes them different languages. | #python #ruby #programming #for-loops

  • Google Made Me Ruin A Perfectly Good Website: A Case Study On The AI-Generated Internet (2023) by The Luddite - An Anticapitalist Tech Blog.
    Google Adsense doesn't let you to simply monetize a website - there are certain "guidelines" you must follow. How bad can it be? | #google #adsense #ads

  • Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2016) by Rachel Potvin and Josh Levenberg.
    Google's way of storing almost all of its code in a single repository is full of myths rumors. This article dives inside and answers many questions, including how does Google do it and most importantly - why? | #google #repository #monorepo

  • Knightmare: A DevOps Cautionary Tale (2014) by Doug Seven.
    It is not enough to build great software and test it; you also have to ensure it is delivered to market correctly so that your customers get the value you are delivering. This is the story of how a company with nearly $400 million in assets went bankrupt in 45-minutes because of a failed deployment. | #devops #delivery #automation #failure #lessons-learned

  • Making sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable (2016) by Henrik Kniberg.
    What is a proper way to develop a Minimal Viable Product? What are the real-world examples of great MVPs? And how can we improve on "MVP"? Remember to watch the related video! | #mvp #article #video

  • You'll regret using natural keys (2024) by Mark Seemann.
    Why we should not rely on natural keys as IDs in database design. | #database #id #key #natural-key

  • Programming is mostly thinking (2014) by Tim Ottinger.
    Programming is by a large margin a thinking process. Tim Ottinger explores how and what we think about while writing a program. | #programming #thinking

  • Good Retry, Bad Retry: An Incident Story (2024) by Denis Isaev.
    Should a client retry web request if original request fails? This is a remarkable story of an engineer who learned that exponential backoff and jitter are not that simple and may cause load amplification. He utilized circuit breakers, retry budgets and deadline propagation to handle it. | #network #requests #retry #amplification #highload #circuit-breaker #lessons-learned

  • Bottom-up Architecture: Bridging the Architecture-Code Gap (2024) by Oliver Drotbohm at GOTO 2024.
    Oliver talks about aligning software architecture with DDD and enforcing architecture via tools like ArchUnit and jMolecules. He shows jMolecules usage in a Spring Boot project and talks about ways of decomposing Spring Boot -based applications via Spring Modulith.

    Oliver also discusses software decomposition in general. For example, he mentions that the primary goal of Software Architecture is to find a way to decompose the domain model. He also notices that "Do we want to decompose a domain" should not be equated with "Do we want to do microservices?" | #architecture #ddd #spring-boot #spring-modulith #goto #video

  • I/O Redirection by The Linux Documentation Project's Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide
    A very concise and comprehensive guide to I/O redirection in shell. | #io #bash #redirection

Personal development

History, Culture and Society

  • Your kid's grades are bullshit (2024) by Anand Sanwal.
    The author speaks of grades inflation - why high school and collage grades have been rising through years and what is the impact on students and society. | #grades #school #inflation
  • Cultivating Minds: The Psychological Consequences of Rice versus Wheat Farming (2024) by Alex Tabarrok.
    A review of how cultivating rice results in more collectivistic culture, compared to cultivating wheat, which results in more individualistic culture. In short - cultivating rice requires a coordinated effort of many people, while growing wheat requires less labour and coordination. | #culture #rice #wheat #collectivism #individualism