Four short links: 12 March 2020
AWS Bills, Offline-first, Censorship, and Corporate Engineering Blogs
- AWS Bill Analysis — always interesting to see how to approach lowering your costs. In this case, the project owner works for Amazon on AWS, but still there were savings to be had.
- A Design Guide to Writing Offline-first Apps — In this article, we will be diving into some of the engineering challenges that make designing robust offline-first applications with good user experience hard, and explore some architectures.
- Zero Trust Information — To that end, instead of trying to fight the internet—to try to build a castle and moat around information, with all of the impossible tradeoffs that result—how much more value might there be in embracing the deluge? The either-or is a false frame: you can fight the worst without giving up the best. (I think Ben and I would agree that limiting access to encryption is a bad idea.)
- How Some Good Corporate Engineering Blogs Are Written (Dan Luu) — In order to have a boring blog, the corporation has to actively stop engineers from putting interesting content out there. Unfortunately, it appears that the natural state of large corporations tends toward risk aversion and blocking people from writing, just in case it causes a legal or PR or other problem. Presents the process at a couple of different companies with interesting blogs, and some with boring blogs.
