what i'm reading: August 18

For a few weeks I felt too overwhelmed to write a link post, so now I am overwhelmed with my reading list. It seems all I do in these posts is complain that my reading list is too long, but I still find value in recording what I’ve read. Just need to get…better at it? Or acknowledge that I can’t fit reading everything that sounds interesting into my life, but not ready to admit that yet.

I have a lot of papers bookmarked, but have absolutely stopped reading them.

Books

• Started on Team Topologies in audiobook, which is probably not the ideal format. Especially when I’ve normally been listening while biking through the city, so I feel sure I have missed some details. I’m definitely thinking a lot about team structures and interactions though, and glad I’m absorbing the book in some fashion, though I may want to read through a physical copy in the future.

Stories

• Holly Mintzer’s Legal Salvage was a fun near-future sci-fi with very realistic characters

Articles

Career advice

• I’m intrigued by the StaffEng site because I’m looking toward a Staff/Principal role in my future. Especially enjoying the guides such as this one on staff engineer archetypes.

• Even though I’m not a manager I enjoyed reading Cassie McDaniel’s piece on compassionate ways for managers to reduce stress on their teams (though I had to open it in a private window because of Medium paywall)

• I don’t put much stock in anything published by HBR, but this study on how making jokes during a presentation is judged positively when men do it but negatively when women do it was interesting. I am probably still going to make jokes?

• Productivity advice is unpopular in my circles right now, but these three tips from Laura Mae Martin are comfortingly human and realistic. I especially like “productivity is doing what you intended”

• Rah rah product announcement woo, but intriguing to hear that companies as big as Google are experimenting with alternatives to whiteboard interviews for technical roles.

Learning new things

• A programming community I’m a part in had a discussion on dynamic programming which quickly left me in the dust, so I ended up investigating stuff like memoization on my own.

• Shortly afterward I encountered Dan Abramov’s tweet thread about how Dynamic Programming is an obscure term and felt immensely validated.

• I’m trying to start saving links to some of the many, many articles I read while trying to learn a new programming thing, and one of the first I remembered was this from Sunil Sandhu on how to loop through arrays in React. I took two weeks off this React project and this all looks like a foreign language again.

• At my Recurse Center mini-batch, I was really struggling with translating a feature in my original C++ code to Rust, even after I decided to implement it using the observer pattern, until I read Brooks Patton’s article on implementing the Observer Pattern in Rust. I’d found plenty of stack overflow answers on how to use reference-counting pointers and RefCells, but this was the first thing I read that made clear you have to clone the pointer when adding the observer. I still, uh, don’t fully understand how it works, but at least my code compiles.

There’s still a pandemic on, hey

• This long read by Roxanne Khamsi covers the unclear science of how long COVID-19 lasts in the body

• Pretty convinced by Zeynep Tufekci’s article on how important ventilation is to preventing airborne transmission of coronavirus

Art

• I went into a rabbit hole of tarot deck art while writing a character creator for the Blue Rose RPG, which led me to this interview with artist Trung Nguyen about the beginnings of what became his beautiful Star Spinner Tarot deck.

• Sarah Drasner’s twitter thread on a painting she started was amazing to me because I have always had artistic aspirations but 100% cannot paint at all. It’s a form of wizardry.

Doing technical things well

• I’m interested in doing metrics right at work, so bookmarking Hillel Wayne’s tweet thread on how metrics should drive structural policy changes

• Sandy Maguire’s post on how to write technical posts so people will read them reminds me that my sentences and paragraphs are pretty much always too long.

• Emily Stark’s post on why Password Authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE) isn’t a noticeable security benefit over hashing passwords was almost-but-not-quite past my understanding of cryptographic protocols, but the historical info on why PAKEs didn’t catch on is fascinating.

• Eliza Weisman has an interesting Rust performance story on Twitter, including the importance of not making assumptions about what to optimize for