what I'm reading this week: Oct 31

These days I am reading a lot across many devices and then immediately misplacing the references. Instead, here are some things I found interesting this week.

• The $10m engineering problem, blog post about how Segment cut their infrastructure costs by 30%
  • I found this fascinating! Hope to come back to it as I learn more about infrastructure design to see what else I can get out of it.

• Deep Work: rules for focused success in a distracted world by Cal Newport (audiobook)

  • This book mostly made me angry, but buried in the endless tedious anecdotes about white men being successful is at least a blog post’s worth of good advice.

• How a months-old AMD microcode bug destroyed my weekend Ars Technica article about a bug in certain AMD processors whose onboard random number generator always returns the same value

• Doing Good Better: effective altruism and how you can make a difference by William MacAskill (audiobook)

  • I was on board with this technique until he said one should never allow personal feelings toward an issue to influence your charitable giving. As I am still interested in effective altruism I will keep listening, but with greater skepticism.

• Xiang (Jenny) Ren, Kirk Rodrigues, Luyuan Chen, Camilo Vega, Michael Stumm, and Ding Yuan. 2019. An analysis of performance evolution of Linux’s core operations. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP ‘19). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 554-569.

  • This one digs pretty deep and I decided to come back to it after I finish the work about CPU architecture I have on hold

• Two Twitter-threads-turned-blog-posts on Errata Security: Thread on the OSI model is a lie and Thread on network input parsers

  • I never did learn networking properly in school, but I seem to be finding a flurry of sources on protocols and algorithms so maybe it’s time to stop being intimidated by the topic

• Amy Ousterhout, Adam Belay, and Irene Zhang. 2019. Just in time delivery: leveraging operating systems knowledge for better datacenter congestion control. In Proceedings of the 11th USENIX Conference on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud'19).

  • In which the authors propose a Chimera operating system for datacenters, not to be confused with the Chimera Real Time Operating System.

• The Most Secure Program Is One That Doesn’t Exist by Diane Hosfelt (transcript of talk from QCon SF 2018)

  • Watching talks about Rust is one step closer to learning Rust, right?