Bitch is a book from zoologist Lucy Cooke on correcting misunderstandings and cultural biases in our biological science. She explains, via animal studies, how existing notions of sex, male/female roles, and “what is natural” have been incomplete, if not incorrect.

In Bitch, Lucy goes through the behaviors of lemurs, meerkats, hyenas, moles, orcas, elephants, bonobos, termites, birds and fish to challenge conventional wisdom on nature and the roles of male and females. This alone makes for an engrossing read. I cannot help but to be delighted by learning brand new things about nature and animals. It brings me back to being a child again. What makes things better is her amusing way with words. (I am jealous.) Some choice phrases from the book:

This is a story from Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk podcast. He talked about being on Brian Cox’s show and discussing the futures of space travel. Neil was saying that chemical rocket engines are not going to cut it and we need to look into things like wormholes and warp drives. Then Brian cuts in and explains that wormholes are fundamentally unstable and they won’t work.

Brian was absolutely correct, but that was not the point. The point was about what the audience said. Cox’s audience said to them, “That’s why the Americans discover everything! They are always so optimistic!” (Cox is a British phycisit and Neil is an American physicist).

Staff Plus Live 2021 was a virtual conference held by LeadDev.com on Sept 14, 2021. I believe this is their first conference aimed at Staff+ Engineers. Loosely defined, Staff+ are high-impacting engineers whose success is felt across the company. In other words, these are engineers who creates high leverage. I was able to attend this year’s conference and learned a lot from it. I started this post to write down what resonated with me before I forget about them.

Just the act of measuring something can change outcomes. I love the reference to Jespen.

https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/

Back from a long vacation. This week, we have folk wisdom on visual programming

https://drossbucket.com/2021/06/30/hacker-news-folk-wisdom-on-visual-programming/

Humans and incentives, and why some metrics (or objectives and key results) should not be public.

http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2021/06/01/count/

Systemd, the good parts

https://lobste.rs/s/po98o2/systemd_good_parts

My thoughts today led me to reading about nuclear wastes. It turns out that what we call “nuclear waste” is a pretty vague term.

A light-water reactor generates different kind of “waste” from a molten salt reactor. A traditional light-water reactor doesn’t consume fuel efficiently. It leaves behing partially consumed fuel that is not economically attractive to refine for further use. These partially spent rods continue to generate heat and are sometimes stored in cooling pools. Wastes from light-water reactors contain plutonium, which can be used to create atomic weapons.

Grammar visualizer

https://dundalek.com/grammkit/

1. Which leads to a JS parser generator

https://pegjs.org/online

2. And also leads to a JS parser generator with a visual debugger

https://ohmlang.github.io/editor/

This also prompts my interest into a graphviz/dot parser

https://github.com/awalterschulze/gographviz

Which uses this Go parser generator

https://github.com/goccmack/gocc

This exploration also led me to this Go parser generator

https://github.com/alecthomas/participle

I spent a couple of hours evaluating 3rd party libraries. What have I learned? For me, there’s one clear winner in a small field of candidates.

Presently, these are the top hits for “golang gauge counter timer”.

1. https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/go-kit/kit/metrics
2. https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/facebookgo/metrics
3. https://github.com/uber-go/tally

The first result is go-kit. Go-kit isn’t a metrics library. Rather, it bills itself as a “framework for building microservices.” Its metrics package is simply a set of interfaces. You then refrence one of the many sub-packages with concrete implementations. As a consequence, it’s go.mod file is pretty huge.

Go does not allow cyclic imports. A solution is to create a “shared” package to hold interfaces that related packages all reference. This, for some reason, reminds of me join tables in SQL.

Here is an example of a typical Go project. Packages toward the bottom, e.g., “common/persistence”, allow different packages to work with each other without introducing cyclic dependencies. For this project, “log” can be referenced by “config”, but cannot use “config” to conifgure itself.

Oldie but goodie. Go concurrency patterns

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nPdvhB0PutEJzdCq5ms6UI58dp50fcAN/view

Two book recommendations

• https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensive-applications/9781491903063/
• https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/making-software/9780596808310/

Designing Data Intensive Applications: Don’t let the name fool you. The knowledge in this book applies to more than just data processing applications but to distributed systems in general. It is a great book for all software architects.

Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It: A meta-analysis of various theories on software development processes. Is TDD effective? Is Agile just a hype or is it just misused? Which code metrics are actually useful? There are evidence-based answers to many of these questions.

The Peseverance rover lands on Mars. In this month, the UAE, PRC, and US all sent scientific instruments to Mars.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/science/nasa-peseverance-mars-landing.html

TextRank identifies connections between various entities in a text, and implements the concept of recommendation. A text unit recommends other related text units, and the strength of the recommendation is recursively computed based on the importance of the units making the recommendation. In the process of identifying important sentences in a text, a sentence recommends another sentence that addresses similar concepts as being useful for the overall understanding of the text

This blog is such a great example of why it is difficult to creat great software. So often you have to make impossible choices between security and backward-compatibility.

Today’s Go security release fixes an issue involving PATH lookups in untrusted directories that can lead to remote execution during the go get command. We expect people to have questions about what exactly this means and whether they might have issues in their own programs. This post details the bug, the fixes we have applied, how to decide whether your own programs are vulnerable to similar problems, and what you can do if they are.

Sascha Chua is a great resource on Emacs-y things

https://sachachua.com/blog/

Maybe Emacs doesn’t need to be a fusion reactor. I only hope it continues to generate energy for many years to come.

It just needs volunteers to keep the fire going.

https://www.murilopereira.com/how-to-open-a-file-in-emacs/

Replicating a database can make our applications faster and increase our tolerance to failures, but there are a lot of different options available and each one comes with a price tag. It’s hard to make the right choice if we do not understand how the tools we are using work, and what are the guarantees they provide (or, more importantly, do not provide), and that’s what I want to explore here.

Concept: Poison pill

One strategy is a poison pill: a special message on the queue that signals the consumer of that message to end its work. To shut down the squarer, since its input messages are merely integers, we would have to choose a magic poison integer (everyone knows the square of 0 is 0 right? no one will need to ask for the square of 0…) or use null (don’t use null). Instead, we might change the type of elements on the requests queue to an ADT…

Meet GPT-3. It Has Learned to Code (and Blog and Argue).

For many artificial intelligence researchers, it is an unexpected step toward machines that can understand the vagaries of human language — and perhaps even tackle other human skills.

https://rootsofprogress.org/immunization-from-inoculation-to-rna-vaccines

When you get your covid shot (probably in 2021), take a moment to think back on the 300 years of progress that got us to this point.

https://github.com/wbolster/emacs-python-black

This is an Emacs package to make it easy to reformat Python code using black, the uncompromising Python code formatter.

What are your favorite CLI apps?

I’m looking for CLI utilities that are definitely not part of the POSIX required or optional utilities, and more coloquiallly not considered to be standard BSD or *nix fare.

The Penderwicks

My daughters couldn’t stop lauging during storytime. They actually enjoy bedtime now. Birdsall is an excellent writer.

Just write the praser

This is a whirlwind tour of writing parsers by hand. Why would you want to do that, when tools like Yacc exist to do it for you?

I recently participated in 2020 Emacs User Survey. One of the questions asked is “When you were first learning Emacs, what did you find difficult to learn?” The obvious answer is keyboard shortcuts, e.g., instead of CTRL-S for save, it is CTRL-X CTRL-S. Instead, CTRL-S performs find, which is usually mapped to CTRL-F, and so on and so forth.

Why Emacs is hard for new users

There were other problems too. I didn’t put them all down in the survey. I’ll jot them down here as they come to mind.

I recently got a Logitec Razer Kiyo for my Zoom meetings. Currently, I need to use it on on Linux Laptop, and it works rather fine. I was skeptical that it would “just work” on Linux, but it did! There is also a software package named v4l-utils that allows you to configure the zoom (crop) level of your video, which is nice for cutting out undesirable background.

apt-get install v4l-utils

You can get a listing of attached cameras with

How to hire for your organization

A three-part series from 9/21/20 to 10/5/20 on how to hire for your organization.

The Tempral Workflow Framework

Let’s look at a use case. A customer signs up for an application with a trial period. After the period, if the customer has not cancelled, he should be charged once a month for the renewal. The customer has to be notified by email about the charges and should be able to cancel the subscription at any time.

This Feburary, I ordered a Dell XPS-13 Developer Edition. The Developer Edition is a line of Dell laptops that ships with certified Linux OS. It has been my programming powerhouse for the last eight months.

My first choice for a laptop was not Linux. Windows and macOS are simply more practical. Games and MS Office just works on Windows. Software support on macOS is generally good (except games), but it beats Windows with its underlying BSD architecture. There is better hardware support simply because more people use it. However, I ultimately ended up with a Dell and Linux and it worked out great.

The Ultimate Guide to GPT3 from Twilio

A step-by-step walk through of what it is like to the the GUI to GPT3 from OpenAI

A Columnist Makes Sense of Wall Stree Like None Other (See Footnote)

Mr. Levine wasn’t always a darling of business media and finance Twitter. (The best measure of his audience’s devotion may not be his 112,000 Twitter followers, but rather the 3,000 that follow @MattLevineBot, a fan account describing itself as a bot that mimics his writing style.) He began his post-collegiate career as a Latin teacher, then worked as a lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz before advancing to Goldman. Despite having made more money at white-shoe law and Wall Street firms than he does as a writer, Mr. Levine says he is happier now. He is doing exactly what he has long wanted to do. This is the story of his ascension. It begins with an escalator.

Software engineers find it natural to talk about abstractions. We have ideas such as Decorators, Model-View-Controller, and Message Queues. These abstractions allow software engineers to talk to each other using our own rich and succint language. Abstractions, however, is not unique to engineers. In my role as a parent and an American citizen, I am constantly confronted with new abstract ideas arising out of life.

The abstractions I am referring to are new words and ideas coming out of our shared culture. For example, words that do not exist twenty years ago: Me-Too and BLM as well as a redefinition of words like gender and socialism.

The Empathy Gap from Effectiviology.com

For example, if a person is currently feeling calm, the empathy gap can cause them to struggle to predict how they will act when they’re angry. Similarly, if a person who is on a diet is currently full, the empathy gap can cause them to struggle to assess how well they will be able to handle the temptation to eat when they’re hungry.