what I'm reading this week: Nov 16

• I wanted to quickly check my intuition that Rust doesn’t have garbage collection and instead found this Steve Klabnik essay about that and a lot more. The takeaway I think is that Rust’s static memory management makes GC redundant?

• There was a lot of hoopla about the implicit algorithmic bias in the new Apple Card, but I found Jamie Heinemeier Hansson’s post particularly incisive. Especially the widely-quoted “justice for another rich white woman is not justice at all.”
• Parallel Commits: An Atomic Commit Protocol For Globally Distributed Transactions
  • Cockroach Labs has this amazing blog full of crunchy technical details of design decisions they’ve made when building CockroachDB, their distributed database product. I loved this deep dive into the complex intersection of atomic transactions and distributed consensus, with a brief sidebar into using TLA+ for formal verification.
• File Systems Unfit as Distributed Storage Backends: Lessons from 10 Years of Ceph Evolution
  • Having just learned about Ceph in a cloud computing course and read Alex Petrov’s talk transcript about storage systems last week, I was in a much better position to understand this paper! I also leaned on the summary from The Morning Paper for some of the highlights.
• Also helpful for getting a handle on file systems was this cool tweet thread about formatting floppy disks
• I keep meaning to dig more into Vaidehi Joshi’s BaseCS series, so today I randomly started with her intro to abstract syntax trees. It probably would have been better to start with the preceeding articles about parsers, but I’ve had to interact with ASTs and parsers enough at work to have a basic foundation.