Interesting Things #23 — Persistence in lambda
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.
This week has also been busy but I’m also mixing up how I do things and making some adjustments to the content. Less stories, more quality. Better signal-to-noise ratio. Or so I hope.
Let’s give it a couple of weeks or so for things to settle down, and then we’ll see.
In any case, I hope you’ll continue to like the stories. Happy reading!
#tech
Abusing AWS Lambda to make an Aussie Search Engine — Need persistence? Embed the index by pre-compiling each shard into it’s own lambda. Sneaky. (hn)
Lessons learned from running GraphQL at scale — We used multiple strategies to optimise resource utilisation and faced two major challenges. (hn)
App Engine to Google Kubernetes Engine - a journey — We faced a few challenges that required careful preparation, planning and rollback options as needed. (hn)
Why data scientists shouldn’t need to know Kubernetes — While it’s good for data scientists to own the entire stack, they can do so without having to know K8s. (hn)
Ebooks Are an Abomination — If you hate them, it’s not your fault. (hn)
There are (at least) two types of package managers — Program managers are what Linuxes and other Unixes have. Module managers are what languages have. (hn)
The long-term consequences of maintainers’ actions — The ideology of moving fast and breaking things does not translate to success in the world at large. (hn)
If you copied any of these popular StackOverflow encryption code snippets, then you coded it wrong — Very often I traced security issues to StackOverflow code snippets that got highly upvoted. I point out why they are wrong.
#work
Developer Burnout: Why It Happens and What We Can Do About It — Strategies developers can adopt to manage stress while contemplating larger, more impactful decisions.
An Old Programmer Loses His Job — I am an IT professional. How could this happen?
3 Years — I was made redundant 3 years ago and that’s resulted in lots of freelance success. (hn)
#business
GitHub stars won’t pay your rent — Going from OSS to SaaS. Mistakes made and lessons learned from launching a browser For developers. (hn)
Engineer vs Entrepreneur Mindset — Take a few steps back to see the tradeoffs made by each group and see if we can take the best from both worlds. (hn)
Reputation Markets — It’s interesting to think about the exchange rate between financial and social capital. Reputations, like stocks, have P/E ratios. (hn)
#science
The Journey to Define Dimension — The concept of dimension seems simple enough, but mathematicians struggled for centuries to precisely define and understand it. (hn)
Batteries of the future set to be cheaper and better — just by adding sugar — Lithium-sulfur batteries store two to five times more energy than lithium-ion. Can they be made robust enough to be recharged 1,000 times? (hn)
How much will our oceans warm and cause sea levels to rise this century? We’ve just improved our estimate — A new analysis uses 15 years of autonomous underwater measurements and simulations from the latest global climate models. (hn)
A Massive Subterranean ‘Tree’ Is Moving Magma to Earth’s Surface — Deep in the mantle, a branching plume of intensely hot material appears to be powering vast volcanic activity.
Physicists Just Accidentally Made a New Discovery About Black Holes — They exert negative pressure on the space around them.
Self-sustaining solar house on wheels wants to soak up the Sun — A concept recreational vehicle. (hn)
#life
The Real Reason Why You Sabotage Your Own Goals — Why do we avoid good habits like exercising and eating healthy? A mental reflex called psychological reactance may be the culprit. (hn)
Psychologists Are Learning What Religion Has Known for Years — Social scientists are researching what humans can do to improve their quality of life. Their findings echo what religious practices perfected centuries ago. (hn)
57 small things that have made a big difference in my life… — You can decide for yourself if further reading is worth your time. (hn)
#random
The wolf cat — how this bizarre, adorable cat came to be — It’s a relatively new type of breed and a pretty unusual one as well.
One Giant Leap for Tortoise-Kind — Before humans entered the moon’s orbit, these slow and sedentary residents of the Great Steppe did. (hn)
#end
If you liked these stories, please share them (or this newsletter) with your friends. I would appreciate it if you help me spread the word. 🙏
Enjoy your reading and have a good day, Beng
