Four short links: 15 November 2019
- From Serverless to Elixir — always interesting to hear about other people’s technical journeys. I don’t recall the exceptions off hand because this was the quickest I’ve ever shut down a multi-variate test or rolled back code, but I drove the Logger straight into the ground. Request times sky rocketed, memory went off the rails, and I started seeing all sorts of crashes in the Logger process. Steam started coming out of everything and I swear I saw a sprocket fly off. I kinda backed away slowly from that approach.
- The Companies Venture Capital Isn’t Allowed to Invest In — The case of JUUL is quite divisive, and one I don’t have a major opinion to add on. There’s absolutely questions that need to be asked about underage use, and whether the product was designed to appeal to underage users. In these sorts of cases, VCs bear some responsibility for negative behavior when they support founders and decisions which go against the interests of society. Well, with firm and clear moral stances like this, I’m sure absolutely nothing can go wrong.
- The Difference Between Quick and Full Format of a Disk — far more than you ever wanted to know, but it’s surprising how much it turns out that you DO want to know about this.
- How Figma’s Multiplayer Technology Works — another “inside our tech” story, with a good explanation of pros and cons of the decisions they made. A favorite saying of mine is: “experience is a hard master, but fools will have no other.” Reading other people’s experiences is a much gentler master.
