Link: Worst Practices of Software Development

Nothing earth-shattering, but I enjoyed Worst Practices of Software Development.

Brett Slatkin, author of Effective Python, briefly interviews several famous faces of software development — like Julia Evans and Mitchell Hashimoto — about a “worst practice” that they are happy to embody. It’s good to have people go on record to remind everyone that they need not do all — or even most of — the “right things” to be successful.

Journal: watchOS 10

Apple flagged watchOS 10 as “the biggest update since the introduction of Apple Watch”. And it is quite a large set of changes. This is a quick post about how one change made a big difference to the day-to-day UX of my watch.

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Big Trees of Bristol

Just south of Bristol, next to the small village of Failand, is a patch of woodland. We were surprised to find that in the middle of this woodland is “Big Tree Grove”, a stand of ten or so sequoia trees (“Giant Redwoods”). While these are not so giant as those in California, they are still impressive to be amongst.

Links: September 2023

The challenges of building things with language models, problems with peer reviewing of scientific papers, MongoDB’s new query execution engine and comparing operational automation with Iron Man.

Enjoy.

  • Squish Meets Structure: Designing with Language Models

    I really enjoyed Maggie Appleton’s talk about designing with large language models. It’s a fascinating discussion of how we are trying to understand how to work with these new tools, which work in different ways to how we are used to.

    We’re trying to make an unpredictable and opaque system adhere to our rigid expectations for how computers behave. We currently have a mismatch between our old and new mental models for computer systems.

    And the slides are somehow beautiful.

  • The rise and fall of peer review - by Adam Mastroianni

    Peer review in the sciences has come in for a bit of a bludgeoning recently. This piece argues that it’s adding little value. If anything, that peer review is actively hostile to new ideas and serves mostly to entrench existing hierarchies (and a large publishing industry).

    Can we do better?

  • Inside New Query Engine of MongoDB | Nikita Lapkov

    In my day job at Cloudant, I think a lot about how we could make our database better. I enjoy any and all deep dives into how other systems work. I find it helps create a library of patterns that I can later match against as I dig into problems.

    Here we learn how MongoDB created an idea called slots, which they used to significantly improve the efficiency of moving data values through their query execution pipeline.

  • Automation Should Be Like Iron Man, Not Ultron - ACM Queue

    Also at Cloudant, we’ve found automation that increases and magnifies the abilities of our operators to be the best kind of automation. It allows us to manage more and more machines, while also increasing the flexibility we have in managing load across the system. Because it is magnifying our abilities, instead of replacing them, it allows us to maintain understanding of the system. Our understanding comes in very useful when things go wrong that automation does not cover.

    This article sits well with this experience, and I can see myself referring to it over time to explain our approach.

Mini-project: mdanchored

For a few years now, I’ve been kind of telling myself, on and off, “you should really learn Rust you know, it looks like it has legs and could be rather useful”. In that same way that you tell yourself, as you get older, in an absent-minded kind of way, “You should really settle down now” or “Really! By your age you should have acquired a taste for dark chocolate”. Basically: “do something serious and grown up”. And, while I did settle down, and get to like dark chocolate, I didn’t get around to writing any Rust.

But sometimes you have to make your own opportunities, and I had an idea for a tiny application, and instead of reaching for Go or Python, I reached for Rust.

It was fun, and I wish I’d done it sooner.

(Is Rust “grown up”? I’m not sure, but over time I’ve learned that I like learning the lower-level details of the systems I work with, and Rust seems like a good next step in that process.)

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