David Edgar's website

Sunday, 20 October 2024

🔖 Blog Microfeatures

Lots of neat little features to make a blog really shine. Some of them are obvious, like RSS feeds. Others are more appropriate to blogs more honed in on longer, focused pieces. Some of them are just QOL.

🔖 A Bunch of Programming Advice

It's more accurate to call it a bunch of software engineering advice, as most of it is about engineering practices, particularly on large, team-based projects.

🔖 How Complex Systems Fail

An analysis of complex systems, how they can (and do) fail, and how to manage their failure and their operation.

🔖 Fear Makes You a Worse Programmer

Advice on being braver as a programmer. This is actually good advice for anything where you can't really do any damage be screwing up,

🔖 Manifesto for a Humane Web

A call to action for (re-)building a web designed for humans, not for capitalism

🔖 Design Docs at Google

A look at how (I assume some parts of) Google does design documents for their projects

Saturday, 19 October 2024

🔖 Database Fundamentals

High level summary of the concepts discussed in Database Internals by Alex Petrov and Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann

🔖 How to Send Progress Updates

Tips on communicating progress via updates to people who are interested or need to know

🔖 Building BerkleyDb

Incomplete walkthrough on building your own database

🔖 How Postgres stores data on disk – this one's a page turner

Come for the pun in the title, stay for the look at how database systems structure data on disks.

🔖 Dead Hang Delight

Dead hang exercise, using body weight to improve upper body strength

🔖 Regenerative No Till Gardening

How this one family improved some land through light touch techniques to rejuvenate the soil.

🔖 Engage your audience by getting to the point, using story structure, and forcing specificity

Some tips on communication. Basically, be concise, get to the point, create structure.

🔖 Serving a billion web requests with boring code

Basically "Choose Boring Technology" (cited and linked in the first couple of paragraphs) and then expanded with "and these are the choices I made"

🔖 My First Kubernetes

Walkthrough of setting up a Kubernetes cluster on a set of Orange Pi 0s

🔖 How To Think In Writing

I mean...quoting Paul Graham right at the top. oof. But the thrust of the piece is generally good. Basically a paean to the essay and forced to structure thoughts in order to examine them

🔖 Writing Components That Work In Any Frontend Framework

A learning guide to web components

🔖 Learn Web Components

A learning guide to web components

🔖 Every company should be sold to its employees

I can't decide if this is arch-capitalism or not. I am still brainworkmed by Kim Stanley Robinson's economic models from the Mars trilogy, and fell in love with the idea of joint ownership co-operatives. I loathe stock options offered to employees, which grant no actual ownership, just asking staff to give the company a loan and in return by on puppet strings

🔖 You should make a new programming language

Call to action to explore building your own programming language

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