Selected Reads (2020-08-22)
This is a selection of articles, videos, tweets, and sundry that I’ve found interesting over the last week or so.
Dear Google Cloud: Your Deprecation Policy is Killing You
Author: Steve Yegge
A great post (rant, really) by Steve Yegge on Google Cloud’s deprecation policy, how it relates to google’s internal culture, and how it affects their customers. Largely the inspiration for my recent post on software breakage within teams.
Types as axioms, or: playing god with static types
Author: Alexis King
A new post from one of my favorite blogs. The same author’s Parse, Don’t Validate is probably the post on software engineering that I recommend the most often. This one goes into types as axioms, encouraging us to think of types as positive-space definitions of what our desired program behavior, rather than as negative-space restrictions. This one was discussed in our work slack, and one of my colleagues posted this video of philosopher Slavoj Žižek discussing the intricacies of negation, which was both really interesting and a good companion for the topics discussed in the blog post.
Baking those Potatoes with Microservices and Vendors
Author: Rachel by the Bay
I liked this post setting up “hot potato” and “cold potato” routing as a metaphor for team dynamics, particularly in a microservices context, where “hot potato” refers to those people or teams who immediately take ownership and dive into a problem, while “cold potato” refers to those who tend to ignore or pass ownership on to other teams.
Laying the Foundation for Rust's future
Author: Rust Core Team
Like most of us, I was upset by the news that Mozilla had to lay off about a quarter of its workforce. I have been a Firefox user since 2004, other than a brief flirtation with Chrome when it was new, and I appreciate all the work Mozilla does to promote an open web. Rust was created at Mozilla, and while I knew that Rust’s governance was very intentionally community-driven and not dependent on Mozilla, I was very glad to see that the core team is creating a foundation so that they can manage the financial and contractual requirements the language requires.
RustConf 2020
I’m going to be writing an entire post on RustConf, but here are a few quick links to some of my favorite talks. All of the talks were great, but these are the ones I think I will be most frequently referring people to.
Opening Keynote
Presenter: Rust Core Team
I really dug the opening keynote of this year’s conference, which emphasized the main values of the Rust project (people, empathy) and talked about how it’s been Rust’s position from the beginning that software is inherently political, and to create a language and a community in which everyone is empowered to build software, you must face the politics head-on, which indeed the Rust project has consistently done. This presentation highlighted how the focus of the language team on user community and empathy has helped to make Rust the successful and much-loved language that it is.
Error Handling Isn't All About Errors
Presenter: Jane Lusby (author of eyre)
A relatively deep dive into how Rust’s trait system and approach to error handling enables a couple of points of differentiation not often found in other languages: first, that there is a clear difference in idiomatic handling of recoverable vs. unrecoverable errors, and second, that the Error trait enables a differentiation between errors and error reporters.
Rust for Non-Systems Programmers
Presenter: Rebecca Turner
I was really glad to see this talk at the conference. It’s an exploration of writing a simple Rust program from the perspective of someone coming from a dynamic language like Python, and it presents some techniques that you can use to speed up your initial forays into the language, especially when writing something for your own edification (don’t be afraid to unwrap, don’t be afraid to clone, etc.). This will go straight into my list of resources to send people who are getting into Rust for the first time.
Learning Empathy from Pokémon Blue
Presenter: Siân Griffin
The closing keynote, this talk was not particularly rust-specific, but was without a doubt one of the more interesting talks I’ve ever seen. It takes a deep dive into the MissingNo rare candy glitch from Pokémon Blue, with Rust examples of what Siân was able to learn about how the original game worked. This was an amazing exploration both into the constraints of the programming required for this generation of games and the subtle ways that small, seemingly innocuous bugs can work together to create entirely unexpected effects. A must-watch!
University Funding and COVID preparedness
Author: Bret Devereux
A twitter thread from the author of one of my absolute favorite blogs (an ancient military historian who often writes about fantasy and science fiction, his six-post series on the tactics and strategy at the Siege of Gondor is absolute gold, as is his exploration of what Sparta was actually like). Bret Devereux here talks about why it would’ve been financial suicide for colleges to not attempt reopening, given the last 20 years or so of cuts to public funding for higher education, increased reliance on adjunct teaching staff, flat professor salaries, and ballooning administrative costs. A clear and cogent call for change in the way we fund our colleges, I found myself nodding along vigorously, as his points all matched exactly what I saw in my graduate program.
Bill Gates Interview on the United States' COVID Situation
This interview posted to Ars Technica is a really interesting one. I found particularly interesting Gates’ stance on political donations, and his assessment of the current state of COVID testing in the United States.
Politics
I’m not generally interested in making this blog super political, but it certainly does seem to me that the current president is hell-bent on following what is a distressingly tyrannical playbook. As such, I was very glad to see that the main speeches made this week at the Democratic National Convention were without exception excellent.
Even if you’ve already decided that you’ll vote for literally any human being with a pulse other than Trump like I had done, I think that these speeches are worth watching, if only to feel that warm fuzzy feeling again of watching leaders who are capable of stringing together coherent sentences.
Michelle Obama DNC Speech
The former first lady makes a moving exhortation that this is one of the most important elections of our lifetimes, and that even if you normally detest politics, there has never been a more important time to exercise your right to vote.
Barack Obama DNC Speech
I had plenty of issues with particular things Obama did or didn’t do while he was president, but damn if he isn’t one of the best orators in modern history. I won’t lie, I’ve been hoping for the duration of the Trump presidency for Obama to take the gloves off and tell us what he really thinks, and this is I think one of the first times I’ve heard him be openly critical of the sitting president. Definitely worth a watch.
Biden Nomination Speech
Seeing that even Fox News anchors were admitting that this was an undeniably strong speech, I checked it out. It’s a wonderful speech. Strong, emotional, well measured, and hitting all of the salient points, it’s moved me from being primarily an anti-Trump voter to an actually a little excited about Biden voter.