Four short links: 1 October 2019
Research, Observability, Self-Enumeration, and Probabilistic Programming
- Just Enough Research — a book that comes recommended by Simon Willison.
- Observations on Observability — I think the future of operating software systems at scale will look like process engineering. We will rely on continuous signals and look at software systems as dynamical systems. We will embrace similar techniques for process control and continuous improvement. This is why I do not like the term observability as it is currently used. In operating software systems at scale, we may want to reserve the traditional definition of observability as it relates to controllability.
- History of Self-Enumerating Pangram Tweet — a history of the work that went into making sentences (and now tweets) that enumerate their contents accurately.
- Anatomy of a Probabilistic Programming Framework — I realized that despite knowing a thing or two about Bayesian modeling, I don’t understand how probabilistic programming frameworks are structured, and therefore couldn’t appreciate the sophisticated design work going into PyMC4. So, I trawled through papers, documentation, and source code of various open source probabilistic programming frameworks, and this is what I’ve managed to take away from it.
