Reading has compounding effects - Keep reading.

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2020    

Have all your habits back in the COVID ‘lock-down’ started to go away once the society opened up again? What seems like productive reading time in the morning reverted back to mindless commutes between work and home. I can relate and in november, this is my attempt to get back to my reading habits every single day.


Back in my previous article Want to improve? You have got to read, I’ve wrriten how improvement and personal development happens when you put in the time to read and learn. If personal development is important for you, prioritize time to read.





For all developers whom are looking for direct alternatives to google’s tools. it is interesting to see the extent of inconvenience this community of non-googlers would go just not to use google. Privacy definitely has its importance; all the more paramount when its used in your disfavour.



The more time you spent building your product, your own furniture, or even your software will create this irrational love for it. Some call it the ikea effect where furnitures build by your own hands seems to have more worth than it actually has - an addition of sentimental worth.


“It’s often effort that ultimately creates long-term satisfaction,” wrote Dan Ariely wrote in his book The Upside of Irrationality, after co-authoring the Ikea effect paper. “Greater labor leads to greater love.”



While it is not entirely true, there are some good pointers to take away from this article. Coincidentally, I agree with point 2,4,6,8,10. A good design makes a product understandable. The design is supposed to make the product self explanatory. The classical example is how a 3 year old was able to understand how to use an iphone without any manual or explanation. That is a ton of genius packed into one small device.



It is interesting how things that we take for granted are actually a solution to challenging problems that were faced by the previous generations. While it is a story back into history, here is a quote from John E. Warnock, the cofounder of Adobe.


“What industries badly need is a universal way to communicate documents across a wide variety of machine configurations, operating systems and communication networks. These documents should be viewable on any display and should be printable on any modern printers. If this problem can be solved, then the fundamental way people work will change.” — John E. Warnock, the cofounder of Adobe



  • A guy walks into an apple store
    While Apple is talking about saving the earth by producing less electronic waste, I would hope to see how they are backing up their attempts with statistics. Beyond that, I just think its ridiculous to say that and charging new charging brick and new charging wires at such an exorbitant price. One always wonder what would Steve Jobs do.


Rather than to fight the slow fight to convince others to drive less and thus have less cars on the road, how about a radical alternative?


Give them an pleasant alternative, escooters. This can help to cover short distance travels, it also help us to see how the government can chart the way for a societal change in lifestyle. A step forward for countries to reduce in carbon footprint is to create bicycle lanes to encourage more bicycle as preferred mode of transport.


-Setting up your employees to succeed


Give them space and time to work, free from distractions. Work from home’s top distractions are actually the consistent messages that keeps coming in while being physically around your coworkers.


Work from home allows you the socially acceptable approach to mute your employees so you can focus on the tasks before you. While WFH heightens the room for productivity, people are feeling more lonely than before.


The disconnection with their coworkers can also affect their productivity as their mental wellness can be affected with prolong isolation. Companies however feels that it is personal employee responsibility to get themselves connected. Essentially, while it is true to a large extent, companies can play its part to setup itself up for success; not by luck but by design. This includes digital engagements, interactive digital townhall, more frequent get togethers once in a while to bring people together.



Technology (software developer space)



Using null might be interesting if you care about property existence. If it is undefined, you wouldnt know if the variable foo might be undefined or if the object doesn’t have a property foo. If you want to explicitly communicate via types that property foo exists and might have a bottom value. Then null is one of your approach.


It is a really interesting on the discussions behind something seemingly so simple. Check this article out if you are in for a good nerdy discussion.





The two LBs route requests based on different critierias across the different layers of OSI layer. Network assumes availability as long as there is a successful TCP ping to the resource; regardless of the content of the pong response. App LB allows you to validate the content of the response to be correct.


Very good short snippet to understand the different use-cases.



It is your experiences and achievements that shows how good a programmer you are. Flush those out. Don’t go flashing your education status when that truthfully does not reflect the strength of a programmer. You can be book smart but not a good programmer with a long history of writing bad code. Get that sorted out.



The secret to serving static video content is to use CDNs.
This is a simple description of what is a CDN. This might be my an interesting topic to delve deeper to explore the science behind this magic.


Some of the CDNs includes Limelight, Level 3, Akamai, CloudFront, and CloudFlare. For Netflix, they created their own CDN call Open Connect. This is definitely another tool to explore.


Here’s an overview of how Netflix uses the client to determine the *best CDN to use:

  • The API signals that the content this person is trying to watch is on, say, 10 different CDN servers.
  • The client intelligence picks the CDN that it calculates to be best*
  • The client intelligence continually probes to find the best way of receiving content


Pets

Servers or server pairs that are treated as indispensable or unique systems that can never be down. Typically they are manually built, managed, and “hand fed”. Examples include mainframes, solitary servers, HA loadbalancers/firewalls (active/active or active/passive), database systems designed as master/slave (active/passive), and so on.


Cattle

Arrays of more than two servers, that are built using automated tools, and are designed for failure, where no one, two, or even three servers are irreplaceable. Typically, during failure events no human intervention is required as the array exhibits attributes of “routing around failures” by restarting failed servers or replicating data through strategies like triple replication or erasure coding. Examples include web server arrays, multi-master datastores such as Cassandra clusters, multiple racks of gear put together in clusters, and just about anything that is load-balanced and multi-master.\


They can go down whenever, however. But they are always creating new server applications to ensure that the service is online.




TLDR;


Reading has this compounding effect with tangible effects budding months or even years of consistent practice. In technology, while it is easy to just chase the work and code, one of the most fundamental habits of x10 engineers is the habit of reading and immersing themselves in tech talks and discussions. May us all engineers develop this habit and make the world a better place; one piece of code at a time.