Category Archives: product design

Coding

2024 Reading list (updated as we go)

Figures from the Global Carbon Budget 2024 : https://robbieandrew.github.io/GCB2024/

C Just In Time : cjit https://dyne.org/cjit/ : fast like hell

State of HTML (and related) https://2024.stateofhtml.com/en-US

Neural Networks : Zero to Hero https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html

state of swe jobs market https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/state-of-eng-market-2024

reinforcement learning explained : https://ai.gopubby.com/how-did-alphago-beat-lee-sedol-1a160d76612b

O(1) lfu : http://dhruvbird.com/lfu.pdf

C11 atomics (atomic_int for ex) are still not supported by C++ when including C code : https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p0943r6.html and https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2015/p0063r0.html

Round Robin DNS : https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8305

Srinivasa Ramanujan : https://www.quantamagazine.org/srinivasa-ramanujan-was-a-genius-math-is-still-catching-up-20241021/

What is legacy code ? According to https://understandlegacycode.com/blog/key-points-of-working-effectively-with-legacy-code/ “Legacy Code is code without tests”

[thoughts] we are transitioning from swe tools to product design tools; llms are blending the boundaries between code, UI/UX, and product ideation.

Are LLMs reasoning ? https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.05229

Open-Meteo is an open-source weather API https://open-meteo.com/en/docs

Remote work is young and we have not built up methodologies or just even habits or practices : https://intenseminimalism.com/2024/the-myth-of-the-missing-remote-work-culture/

A life spent watching the sky : https://www.majakmikkelsen.com/film

Hard life for rust and linux : a proposal for a rust interface to fs .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiPp9YEBV0Q&t=67s

Segment anything : a new AI model from Meta AI that can “cut out” any object, in any image, with a single click https://segment-anything.com/

14 years since Go launched : the good and the bad by Rob Pike https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2024/01/what-we-got-right-what-we-got-wrong.html

Writebook : everything you need to edit and publish your online books

Merchants of complexity : https://world.hey.com/dhh/merchants-of-complexity-4851301b ( on the attraction for complexity read here )

Tired of slack and not owning the data ? https://once.com/campfire#requirements

Something in between a Product Manager and a Software Engineer : Product Engineer i.e. PMs are sometimes not enough technical and SWEs are sometimes not enough product oriented https://refactoring.fm/p/how-to-become-a-product-engineer

myspace reborn https://spacehey.com/

Stephen Wolfram on neural nets : https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2024/08/whats-really-going-on-in-machine-learning-some-minimal-models/

Some good recommendations https://levelup.gitconnected.com/follow-these-6-patterns-or-i-will-reject-your-pull-request-fc08f908e7fe :

  • Early return and align the happy path left
  • Avoid boolens in methods signature
  • Avoid double negations
  • Use default values to avoid unnecessary else in initializations
  • Avoid functions with side effects


3D Mesh generation with object imageshttps://omages.github.io/

Hetzner de servers auction https://www.hetzner.com/sb

Ransomware victims : https://www.ransomware.live/#/recent

Red and Blue teams in cybersecurity : https://anywhere.epam.com/en/blog/red-team-vs-blue-team

How google is using AI internally https://research.google/blog/ai-in-software-engineering-at-google-progress-and-the-path-ahead/

Protecting artists from gen ai : https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/what-is-glaze.html

configuring core dumps in linux/docker https://ddanilov.me/how-to-configure-core-dump-in-docker-container

dolt, a version controlled database mysql compatible https://github.com/dolthub/dolt

MS/DOS 4.01 is open source https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/opensource/2024/04/25/open-sourcing-ms-dos-4-0/

Contents shortage for AI :

Meta, for instance, trained its new Llama 3 models with about 10 times more data and 100 times more compute than Llama 2. Amid a chip shortage, it used two 24,000 GPU clusters, with each chip running around the price of a luxury car. It employed so much data in its AI work, it considered buying the publishing house Simon & Schuster to find more. 

https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/are-llms-about-to-hit-a-wall

Stop doing cloud if not necessary (I’m saying this since years..) https://grski.pl/self-host

Redis forks (after the licence change) :
– redict : https://redict.io/ Drew DeVault + others?
– valkey : https://valkey.io/ backed by AWS, Google, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap, with the Linux Foundation; more to come imo.

nginx new fork https://freenginx.org/ (others forks are openresty)

Too much hype about Devin : Debunking Devin: “First AI Software Engineer” Upwork lie exposed! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNmgmwEtoWE

Matt Mullenweg buys Beeper (already owns Texts.com and Element (New Vector)) consolidating his position in Matrix.org based messaging services : https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/09/wordpress-com-owner-automattic-acquires-multi-service-messaging-app-beeper-for-125m/

golang fasthttp (replacement for standard net/http if you need “to handle thousands of small to medium requests per second and needs a consistent low millisecond response time”. “Currently fasthttp is successfully used by VertaMedia in a production serving up to 200K rps from more than 1.5M concurrent keep-alive connections per physical server.” https://github.com/valyala/fasthttp

Back to basics 🙂 Bloom filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom_filter

1 billion row challenge : https://github.com/gunnarmorling/1brc

golang : alternative to cgo ? https://github.com/ebitengine/purego

Command line benchmark tool : https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine

New jpegli, jpeg-xl derived : https://giannirosato.com/blog/post/jpegli/

Edge CDN techniques : Shielding from fastly i.e. use a designated edge cache instead of origin https://docs.fastly.com/en/guides/shielding on a edge cache miss.

Apple car not interesting anymore : https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-27/apple-cancels-work-on-electric-car-shifts-team-to-generative-ai

golang error handling the Uber way : https://github.com/uber-go/guide/blob/master/style.md#errors

nginx forking : Maxim Dounin annouces https://freenginx.org/en/ on the nginx forum https://forum.nginx.org/read.php?2,299130

Quad 9 free dns 9.9.9.9 : https://www.quad9.net/

UI testing the netflix way : https://netflixtechblog.com/introducing-safetest-a-novel-approach-to-front-end-testing-37f9f88c152d

Check it out : the new super-ide https://zed.dev/

Lex/Yacc today : https://langium.org/

Inside Stripe Engineering Culture, a series a posts : https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/stripe

I find truly interesting the point around promoting a write culture (Execs/Directors in tech blog, SWEs on tech blogs/internal technical documents) : https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/i/140970283/writing-culture
I’m a long-time believer that writing clarifies thinking more than talking and writing persists information, makes it searchable, talking does not. “Verba volant, scripta manent” as the Latins use to say. But this idea shifted into “just enough” documentation (which means it is not necessary) in SW engineering latest methodologies so it is interesting that a multi billion company like stripe is going totally against the tide.

Driving a Tesla Model S in Paris

My brother in law owns a Tesla model S in Paris and I had a chance to try it out last week. One of the most exciting experiences (Miles Davis would have added “with my pants on”) of the last times. You are driving with almost no noise ( I know Jeremy Clarkson will hate this but I like it so much) in total comfort on a car that comes from another planet : this is what it looks like.

First of all I must say that I hate cars and what they represent : I’ve always considered them a necessary evil. I spent tons of money around my cars (smashing them so many times when I was in my twenties), doing maintenance and repairing them that I developed what is my personal requirements list for a car :

  1. accident prevention : a car that foresees a potentially dangerous situation and takes control to avoid an accident/crash. With a car like this I would have saved tons of money and a couple of broken ribs
  2. no maintenance or lowest possible : if I have to use a car I want to have the lowest possible maintenance. Brakes, oil and filters, clutch, distribution belts, sparks …. There is always something to do with your car
  3. do not contribute to city air pollution or do it the less possible

Tesla ( and probably other electric cars in the future will )  is matching exactly my requirements for what I want in a car.  Autonomous driving with all the available variants which range from lane/speed/front car distance control to full autonomous driving would make driving safer and reduce accidents and damage to the car.

And electric traction will make maintenance a distant memory : with the Tesla I tried which was set at maximum engine brake I barely never had to use the brake pedal; the cars brakes by using the electric motors as generators so you recharge you battery just by using the engine break

And performance comes last in the sense that I’m not a super car fan but pulling the gas to the floor on the Model S is a breathtaking experience. The picture on the left shows you the warp effect 🙂

When products/business units ignore each other : Samsung phone and Samsung TV


Let’s assume that you have a Samsung S6 phone and a Samsung TV and that you use videostream for example to see your pc videos on the tv. So since you want to change your tv source to use  chromecast you download the samsung tv remote app (which could have been already installed on a samsung phone) so that you can do everything from your phone, select country and language, wait 10 minutes of download of you have no idea what and in the end …. no tv source change in the samsung tv remote app. But you can see the whole tv product set, ranging from  90″ curved screen to anything else … but no tv source change control …

Videostream guys, please put in your app a universal tv remote feature so that all operations on tv can be done from within the videostream app.