Four short links: 5 August 2020
Autistic Developer, NyanSat, Real-World CRDTs, and Emergent Behaviour
- Tales of the Autistic Developer – Senior Developer — Interesting article from a senior developer with Autism Spectrum Disorder. They talk about the problems it causes, how they solved each problem, and how those problems even became strengths. You can’t read this and not have more empathy for neurodiverse programmers.
- NyanSat: The Open Source LEO Satellite Tracker — (Wired) — With one of the devices up and running, you can point NyanSat’s antenna to specific coordinates in the sky and listen for the radio frequency transmissions coming from a satellite that’s out there.
- PushPin: Towards Production-Quality Peer-to-Peer Collaboration — (PDF) If you want to write multiplayer (real-time collaborative) software like Google Docs, you need to use Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types (CRDTs). They’re not always easy and obvious in the real world, and this paper describes the author’s experiences using CRDTs to build a local-first collaborative app. They describe the architecture, problems, and solutions. It’s a good starting point for anyone who has dreams of building such apps.
- Emergent Behaviour in Balloon Navigation — (Medium) Machine learning sits at the heart of balloon navigation in Google’s Project Loon. This article is about the unprogrammed behaviours such as tacking, loitering, and figure 8s, and why they emerge (with animations).
