Web Review, Week 2023-13
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-13.
The Twitter API is now effectively unmaintained | snarfed.org
Tags: tech, fediverse, twitter
Twitter continues its slow death… That likely explains why the Mastodon to Twitter bridge I’m using has become so unreliable. I’ll just keep ignoring it I guess.
https://snarfed.org/the-twitter-api-is-now-effectively-unmaintained
Cerebras-GPT: A Family of Open, Compute-efficient, Large Language Models - Cerebras
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, foss
Clearly aims to demonstrate the superiority of their specialized hardware for training. That said it’s nice to have proper open models available (architecture, training data, weights… it’s all in the open).
https://www.cerebras.net/blog/cerebras-gpt-a-family-of-open-compute-efficient-large-language-models/
What is the origin of model-view-controller? - Quora
Tags: tech, architecture, design, history
Nice historical perspective from Alan Kay about the MVC architecture pattern.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-origin-of-model-view-controller
Biscuit authorization
Tags: tech, cryptography, security
This looks like an interesting new authorization scheme.
Making Python 100x faster with less than 100 lines of Rust
Tags: tech, rust, python, profiling, performance
Nice walk through for a use of PyO3 to make some Python code much faster. Nice to see how useful py-spy turn out to be in such scenarii as well.
https://ohadravid.github.io/posts/2023-03-rusty-python/
Make your own Optionals
Tags: tech, programming, java, type-systems
There are nice mechanism in the Java type system nowadays to no rely on Optional all the time. This is a good reminder of the main alternative.
https://mccue.dev/pages/3-28-23-custom-optional
The Ambiguous Zone - Ben Northrop
Tags: tech, team, craftsmanship, organization
We might start in a software career attracted by the “perfection of the machines” (already debatable) but indeed to make anything meaningful we need to interact with other people. I often say it but I’ll say it again: it is a team sport.
https://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2023/the-ambiguous-zone.php
Why Engineers Need To Write - by Ryan Peterman
Tags: tech, craftsmanship, writing, remote-working
Indeed, this is the most important skill we need next to coding. Especially in a remote work culture.
https://www.developing.dev/p/why-engineers-need-to-write
The Definition of Senior: A Look at the expectations for Software Engineers
Tags: tech, career, management, leadership, engineering
Nice (even though a bit long) explanation of the skills needed for a senior software engineers. Definitely a bunch of good advises in there.
https://loige.co/the-senior-dev/
Incompetent but Nice - Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Tags: management
Note it’s not about impostor syndrome, I guess lots of us think we’re in this category, that doesn’t make it real.
Anyway, from the management point of view this is indeed a baffling situation when you encounter someone like this. What to do? Definitely not always easy, sometimes induced by the organization as well so it would be too easy to blame on the person alone. We need to pay more attention to those and there’s clearly no magical recipe to handle them.
https://jacobian.org/2023/mar/28/incompetent-but-nice/
The age of average — Alex Murrell
Tags: culture, architecture, design
This is indeed a phenomenon which I find odd. Everywhere you look, culture seems like it became homogeneous… I don’t like this much, but indeed it means it’s easy to be distinctive if you want to.
https://www.alexmurrell.co.uk/articles/the-age-of-average
Bicycle – Bartosz Ciechanowski
Tags: science, physics, bike
Once again an excellent deep dive… We’re getting into the physics of biking, and there are some surprises along the way! In any case this is fascinating all the thinking which went into such an object, the wheels alone are a very clever system.
https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/
Treat your to-read pile like a river | Oliver Burkeman
Tags: culture, productivity
Good advice to fight against FOMO as far as reading material is concerned… just pluck things as they pass by. There’s so much content there’s likely redundancy anyway, hopefully. Yeah… I’m not cured.
https://www.oliverburkeman.com/river
Bye for now!