what i'm reading: Jan 12

Instead of writing up my recent reading I spent most of today reading more things, which is not exactly how I intended this to work.

• Molly Struve shares a specific story about migrating from Memcached to Redis, along with some cacheing best practices

• Starting on my reading list of dystopian tech books with Emily Chang’s Brotopia (audiobook). I expected this to retread a lot of ground I already knew, so was pleasantly surprised to instead learn a lot of details about Silicon Valley and how VC firms work that was new to me. Still lots of downer content and descriptions of assault and harassment.

• Simon Wardley’s tweet thread starts off in open source and ends up in dystopian techno-futurism

• Segun Ola makes a good point about where DIV tags still have value in semantic HTML

• Chelsea Troy has been posting a lot and I have been reading all of it, but I especially liked this post on debugging tactics with a rant in the middle about how the software industry as a whole doesn’t actually teach debugging.

• Dan Lorenc posts eloquently about a topic I am currently invested in: how to apply security to open source dependencies

• Continuing with dependencies, Pablo Díaz writes about a concept for using a graph-oriented database to model software dependencies and identify issues. This article was mostly a narrative about a problem the author solved and did not easily lend itself to steps to apply, but I think there’s useful ideas here.

• I love when people turn talks into blog posts! I am way more likely to read an article than watch a video, and Galo Navarro’s talk on how to build a successful platform team in a large org was worth looking at.

• The Twitter engineering blog has a great post by Bryce Anderson and Ruben Oanta about Twitter’s new load balancing algorithm for their custom RPC system complete with a lot of very helpful diagrams.

• Fiona Voss asked for feedback on an interview question she had about scaling Twitter, which led me down a rabbit hole of wondering how Twitter scaled Twitter. I found this article about their architecture in 2013 in High Scalability, and a Twitter engineering blog post from 2017 about their infrastructure and ops by Mazdak Hashemi, which is still a bit over my head.

• Dan Abramov has an evocative point about how clean code is not a goal in itself

• I greatly enjoyed Cindy Sridharan’s review of tech trends of the 2010s and predictions of the future

• Coda Hale blogged persuasively about organizational performance as parallel systems and what that means for growth. I liked the principles at the end of this one.

• To be contrary, I then read Sonja Blignaut’s metaphor of organizations as flow systems, though I don’t think the two articles express contradictory ideas.

• Esther Derby talks about the risks of anonymous feedback among colleagues

• Edmund Lewry writes about how they define a Tech Lead, while moving into that role

• This list of coaching best practices by Pardis Noorzad is clearly aimed at managers, but I think some of the advice is applicable to everyone who is trying to interact effectively with colleagues. (I take a little issue with the smile comment, but she’s not wrong.)

• Denise Yu made and shared a worksheet for writing a conference talk proposal

• I found Anna Shipman’s blog through one of her recent book reviews, but ended up reading a large section of her archives. I thought this post on best practices for making a pull request will be useful for me to reference as we migrate our codebase from Perforce to Github

• I recently had to go through the Byzantine password process at my work, so reading Emily Cain’s article for Increment about how password policies are terrible for security was mostly cathartic.

• A long explanation of the global problem plastic pollution by Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser is a little depressing but also provides data-based suggestions about what policies could make the biggest difference. (Banning straws does not even come close to making the list.)

• A recent replication of Mueller and Oppenheimer’s study (about how taking notes longhand is better for your memory than typing on a computer) failed to replicate the same results. Another whole generation of pop-psychology books about the benefits of unplugging may turn out to be factually incorrect.

• Checked out Fancy Fairy’s tutorial for making fairy wings