Last months' list is much longer than the one before that - 38 articles opposed to 13 in December of last year (though I did a lot of filtering then).
A lot of articles fall into "not that interesting" category. I tend to just bookmark everything I see and often the articles are not that great. I read them anyway because I’m bored on my way to/from work. The truth is, reading articles is just another way to kill time. But this is arguably better than scrolling through Twitter or Facebook.
This time I will break the list down into categories.
Sustainability
LOW-TECH MAGAZINE is pretty interesting and I’ve subscribed to them. While everyone talks vaguely about technology solving climate change, authors of this magazine are skeptical about high-tech solutions and are looking for low-tech ones.
Articles linked below are interesting because they are hosted on a static, solar-powered website that goes down if there is not enough power.
This article is about the unsustainability of modern wind turbines. Turbines are made of carbon-fiber and other materials that can’t be recycled and are difficult to get rid of. Authors explore ways to make wind power more sustainable.
As someone who likes to take looong hot sowers, I found this article a bit disconcerting. But in the end, I got curious if there is a way to save a bunch of water and energy while keeping some level of comfort with mist showers. This article claims there is.
This article is not really about the environment but the sustainability of content on the Internet. I’m thinking about this topic more and more lately. Wouldn’t it be great if the Internet was more like a library than television?
Software development
I’m coming back to this blog once in a while and always find something interesting. I enjoy Julia’s posts a lot. The idea of a "brag document" is brilliant and I’m going to put one together soon. If only just for myself.
Sometimes clean code™ is not the same as the best code. The author shows an example where code duplication is better than an unnecessary abstraction (that does more harm than good in the long run).
This is something we are starting to deal at work right now - modules in one of our back-end applications are very similar (but not identical) and we can’t agree whether abstraction will help us or not.
New-comers argue that we should abstract, "old" guys say they have been down this road before and it was not good (senior engineers on both sides here).
Joel claims to have found a successful, scientific method for scheduling of software projects. I would love to try this method out in our team sometimes. One thing I find difficult is tracking time spent on different tasks in a way that would support this method and not be a nuisance.
I’m using Markdown for everything, including documentation (usually in
the form of READMEs) but even before finishing this article I’ve realized how
bad it is for this purpose. I will try asciidoc sometime in the
future when I need to write some serious documentation.
I’m a huge Python fan but I will be first to agree that it has some major flaws, especially when it comes Python 2/3 migration. It was interesting to read about painful transition in a really big project.
How This Blog Was Made | Teetotality, Why build this blog - or anything - on IPFS? | Teetotality and A Beginner’s Guide to IPFS - By
I got curious about IPFS (Interplanetary File System) after reading the first article. I’m not sure it is useful to me now but it is something I’m going to watch closely (this is related to the sustainable Internet). It also reminded me about an experimental build and dependency management tool for Scala called Fury which uses IPFS to distribute packages.
The author disagrees with the quote
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
and I’m wondering if he is right. Maybe if making software wasn’t so cheap there would be more good software.
I’m using Docker a lot at work but this article made me realize I know nothing about it.
Honza talks about different ways he tries to make his life easier when creating websites (blogs, documentation, web apps) like static site generators, free CI and FaaS platforms and more.
He is a big fan of Zeit.co and made me want to try it out again.
A funny joke.
Political
I don’t remember where I got this one but my first thought after looking at the title was "let’s see what kind of self-help nonsense they will try to sell me this time". Only after getting a couple of pages into this essay did I realize it is a critique of self-care as well as of constant feeling of being oppressed by capitalism that is common among Millenials (whoever they might be). I’m still unpacking this one and will probably read it for the third and maybe even fourth time. There is just something in there I can’t put my finger on.
I came across The New Republic and read a couple of articles in one sitting. I’m not sure what to think about the magazine. I’ve subscribed to their newsletter but it’s mostly paid promotions and offers of $4000 all-inclusive trips to Cuba (to meet with local intellectuals and to support the revolution, I guess?).
I think I’m reading too much about politics in the USA and need to focus on Europe more. Which I will do in the future.
Here are the articles from TNR:
I keep getting promoted posts from A2larm on Facebook. The articles are hit and miss. This one is about the Czech Pirate Party and how everyone treats them as if they are children and new to politics when in fact they’ve been here for more than 10 years and did a lot of work on different levels of government.
Not that interesting
In no particular order:
-
Haskell for all: Why Dhall advertises the absence of Turing-completeness
-
Key practices for achieving large professional goals | #NoDrama DevOps
-
I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left.
-
How the U.S. Air Force Deployed Kubernetes and Istio on an F-16 in 45 days - The New Stack
-
The context people and tools need to work with your Cloud | #NoDrama DevOps
-
Burnout: Sick and tired of feeling sick and tired - BBC News
Notes and takeaways
This list is generated automatically from bookmarks in my browser. The text is written manually. I’ve used Grammarly for the first time and I’m glad it didn’t find too many errors. If only there was a way to integrate it into Vim…
I like looking back at the articles I’ve read and re-reading some of them. There is always something I would like to come back to but I rarely do. Here are takeaways from this month (maybe this will help me to remember to look at them later):
-
Create a brag document
-
Look more into sustainable Internet
-
Read more about European politics
-
Check out Zeit.co again
I will continue to log articles I read but maybe with more focus on quality over quantity.