what i'm reading: August 20

Was feeling ambitious after my last post and immediately started reading more of my bookmarks. Also took the time to note down all of the books I read last week, since my Kindle failed to mark them as read in Goodreads. Technology, never as convenient as you want it to be.

Books

• I’m still not sure if I like the universe of Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb Trilogy? But I did read Harrow the Ninth in one uninterrupted sitting as soon as the preorder downloaded itself to my kindle.

• The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea by Maggie Tokuda-Hall was a fast read with some interesting gender dynamics and a different take on mermaids, but I will probably not remember anything about it in a few months.

• Someone in a book community I’m in praised P. Djeli Clark’s A Dead Djinn in Cairo, which made me realise I’d only read the sequel, The Haunting of Tram Car 015. Read both of them this time.

• A new T. Kingfisher book showed up in my recommendations, and I bought it on the strength of the title, The Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking. It’s a whimsical and sometimes creepy read, which the author’s note describes as a kid’s book too dark to be published as a kid’s book. Reminded me that I like the work published as Kingfisher, so re-read some that I already had, and ended up buying every other book that’s set in this world.

  • Clockwork Boys: I’d bought and read this a while ago but didn’t remember much about it, so read it again. Part 1 of a series so kind of a weird ending.
  • The Wonder Engine Part 2 of Clocktaur Wars, a much more satisfying conclusion after reading the whole thing.
  • Minor Mage Described as “My first kid’s book that was also too dark to be a kid’s book”
  • Swordheart By this point I was all in on Kingfisher books set in this world. Swordheart has all the beats of a romance novel, where one of the protagonists is a magic sword.
  • Paladin’s Grace The sequel to Swordheart isn’t out yet, but this is potentially the start of a new series with overlapping characters?

• Half a Soul by Olivia Atwater is a Regency romance, but with magic, which means I immediately read it.

• I’d bought Anhaga by Lisa Henry quite a while ago but didn’t have time to read it and then forgot it in my backlog. Sweet queer fantasy romance, though not much happens.

• I like Zen Cho, so picked up The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water Not my favourite by Cho, but well-drawn depiction of a war-torn, Malaysia-influenced fantasy world.

Articles

• This year I learned that August 1 is Emancipation Day in Canada, after the day in 1834 when the British government abolished slavery across the empire.

Whimsical art

• This charming article by George Cave exhaustively classifies the UX of lego interface panels

• Dr Eleanor Janega has another hilarious post about people getting medieval history wrong, in this case mostly focusing on plagues.

• I love this font Losta Masta though I have no idea on earth what I would do with it if I bought it. I just like ligatures.

Leadership

• Marianne Bellotti has an interesting take that good leadership requires embracing risk and fear, and claims that the stereotypical incompetence of many leaders is due to how risk-averse people react to being responsible for large risk.

• Lara Hogan’s Four steps to identifying your next role could be valuable even if you’re not actively job hunting, to try to identify what is working or not working about your current role.

• In the sudden scramble for remote learning, I found this article on evidence-based principles for improving the effectiveness of video instruction to be interesting, and might apply to my attempts to Twitch stream. My heart goes out to students and teachers this year though.

Open source

• Fred Hebert has an in-depth piece about why inclusive language matters in open source from the perspective of explaining to open source maintainers who are not at the forefront of wokeness why this stuff is important.

• I was pretty crushed when I heard about last week’s Mozilla layoffs, and concern about the future of Rust was a small part of that. I appreciated the Rust Core Team’s outline of the future of Rust and the reassurance that the language will keep going.

Ethical technology

• Gilad Edelman wrote a long piece using the experience of the Dutch public broadcaster NPO to argue that getting rid of ad tracking cookies can lead to greater advertising revenues, which would be a powerful shift in online privacy if it were to catch on.

• Somewhat horrified by this new research that shows it’s possible to duplicate keys from a recording of the sound it makes while sliding into a lock. Along with previous research that people can reconstruct sound based on seeing tiny vibrations in random objects, it’s starting to feel like all security and privacy is imaginary.

• Another piece from Marianne Bellotti that’s a little about the ethics of working for a defense contractor and a lot about how AI outcomes could be less terrible if we stopped trying to automate the wrong problems, using Daniel Kahneman’s model of human thinking as two modes, fast and slow.

Programming language wonkery

• Fascinated by Jaana Dogan’s twitter thread about how new languages get productionized at Google, which seems to be an arduous (but thorough) process.

• Frustrated by the inadequate handling of GOPATH dependency downloads on a locked-down corporate network, was intrigued by Tyler Bui-Palsulich’s assertion that Go modules are faster as well as being more flexible. Not familiar enough with Go to feel confident recommending this to others but definitely going to play with it.

• I didn’t realise I needed Sheshbabu Chinnakonda’s clear explanation of the Rust module system but it sure would have saved me some trial and error on my Rust project last week if I’d read this first.

Blogging

• Monica Lent as part of her Blogging for Devs series wrote an incredibly in-depth piece about how links to your website improve your page’s ranking, and how to get those links. It includes enough information that I know this link won’t benefit Monica much because I have too many other links on this page!

• Stephanie Morillo’s post on getting over the fear of publishing new content is focused more on popularity than I am, but I could probably take some of this advice to get over my failure to finish any type of blog post except link collections.

In-depth technical reads

• I like Anit Shrestha Manandhar’s Today I Learned git repository, which is an interesting way of collecting knowledge, much of it on similar topics to what I tend to research. Perhaps something like this would be a better way of structuring my thoughts on what I learn?

• This epic post by Catherine West about using Rust for game development was a fascinating meander through a lot of game programming concepts I was unfamiliar with, and brushed upon (but did not directly address) the reasons I started fighting with the borrow checker while working on my Rust project last week. I don’t think West ever defines “ECS” in the post, so I looked it up (entity component system).

• Tyler Neely’s sled theoretical performance guide is a massive document that I might have been able to absorb better if it were half a dozen blog posts, but it was still funny, and insightful, and full of interesting links for more information about performance in any language, but maybe specifically in Rust.