Interesting Things #17 — HTTP/3

Hi,

This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things, a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and stuff.

Here is a bunch of stories for this week. Space them out and enjoy them slowly. Don’t read all in one sitting. 😁

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Happy reading!

#tech

HTTP/3 From A To Z: Core Concepts (Part 1) — Why was HTTP/3 needed so soon after HTTP/2? How does it improve web performance? (hn)

Comparing Low-Code Tools as a Developer — As a grumpy pessimistic developer I resist change, but I’m happy to admit I’m wrong. (hn)

Principles of Just-In-Time Compilers — Understand the principles of JIT compilation in order to understand how to optimize for the web. (hn)

How we built a general purpose key value store for Facebook with ZippyDB — The history and evolution of the largest strongly consistent, geographically distributed key-value store at Facebook. (hhn)

How does FaceTime Work? — The technical challenges are kind of immense when you think about them.

hosting email for close to free on aws ses (May 2021) — Setup email for your domain using AWS SES, a few lines of Python, and a local dovecot install. (hn)

What Developers Need to Know About Kubernetes — Increasingly, developers are being required to interact with kubernetes. (hn)

How To Design A Reliable Distributed Timer — Lessons from maintaining a legacy distributed timer for months for my employer.

Creating Pull Request that “Scales” — Some common pitfalls and then some general ideas/guidelines. (hn)

A Tale of Two Copies — A straightforward operation accidentally stumbles into slow I/O. (hn)

How to write really slow Rust code — It’s easy to make mistakes and get quite slow performance.

On Unix composability — A personal collection of noteworthy means of composing programs. Followed by a discussion. (hn)

Unix Shell: History and Trivia — Ken Thompson’s first paper on the Unix shell. (hn)

Free form submissions for everyone (Jun 2021) — Re-purposing cloudwatch log analytics to record form submissions and product analytics. (hn)

The Tao of Unicode Sparklines — Rendering sparklines using vanilla unicode. (hn)

So you want to write a GUI framework — The term ‘GUI’ means significantly different things to different people. (hn)

Empty npm package ‘-’ has over 700,000 downloads — Hear from the package’s author on some questions.

#work

The value destroying effect of arbitrary date pressure on code — Net result? A product that incrementally destroys the company’s reputation.

The ethics of being a high level tech consultant (a Fractional CTO) — What’s involved in sharing your wisdom with CEOs so their companies can do well? (hn)

10 Mistakes To Avoid as a Software Development Manager — Speaking from experience in a software leadership position.

What to do when no one tells you what to do anymore — You left your job and have all the freedom in the world. Now what? (hn)

Is Hybrid Work the Future of Work for Developers? — Rethinking what work can look like in the years to come.

Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future — Like it or not, the way we work has already evolved.

#business

The Incompetence That Will Kill Apple — At the end of the day, your fate is determined by the people around whom you surround yourself. (hn)

Two months in: How the SaaS that was built in 7 days is going — Four paying customers out of 142 users for a total of $66 MRR.

Leaders Whose Time Has Passed — They may have helped the business through a critical stage but the business has grown past them. (hn)

Conquering Dragons: How Technical Founders Learn Enterprise Sales — Six leading devops founders describe their first enterprise win. (hn)

License Round-Up — An update on alternative public software licenses. (hn)

An Exact Breakdown of How One CEO Spent His First Two Years of Company-Building — What it’s actually like to be a startup CEO. (hn)

Tale of a Failed Startup, or the Day I Created a Mint Clone — Find out why and how I built it and how it failed. (hn)

#science

Synthetic brain cells that store ‘memories’ are possible, new model reveals — Scientists try to replicate the brain’s biological machinery by utilizing the power of ions. (hn)

Neither Star nor Planet: A Strange Brown Dwarf Puzzles Astronomers — A failed star lacks the necessary bulk to begin nuclear fusion in its core. (hn)

Supernova captured in detail for the first time — As a shockwave blasts its way through a star. (hn)

Moon lacked a magnetic field for nearly all its history — The solar wind could have been depositing resources like water on the Moon’s surface for billions of years.

Turing Patterns Turn Up in a Tiny Crystal — The mechanism behind leopard spots and zebra stripes also appears to explain the growth of a bismuth crystal. (hn)

Chinese scientists develop world’s strongest glass that’s as hard as diamond — Its hardness reached 113 gigapascals (GPa) while natural diamond stone usually scores 50 to 70. (hn)

Mating Contests Among Females, Long Ignored, May Shape Evolution — New work hints that sexual selection is also widespread among females. (hn)

#life

To Be Popular You Must Already Be Popular: On the Dangers of the Bandwagon Effect — The ‘Follow the crowd’ effect is real.

On blankfaces — A blankface is anyone who enjoys wielding power to make others miserable by acting like a cog in a broken machine.

#random

A Beginners Guide to Crypto Derivatives — History, similarities and differences to their traditional counterparts, and how they actually work. (hn)

#end

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Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng