A handful of links

2024-05-09 20:10 • 491 words • ~3 min read ⏲

So, half a year has past since I wrote the last weeknote. This is arguably an indicator that the a fixed schedule does not quite work out for me. On the other hand, the first reboot of week-noting was after stopping for a complete year. So, MTTR (mean time to recovery) is clearly improving.

Some time ago I wrote about a little bookmarking app, that I made for myself. Well, I tweaked it a bit since, and now it can group my link collection by various criteria, one of them being the weeks that I added the bookmark. And so I thought, let's revisit what is in there and share a few articles that stood the test of time. So here's half a dozend, that stem from week 19 of 2022 (that is when I found them, which is not necessarily the same week or even year that they were written), that I think you might enjoy.

Justin Etheredge discusses the trade-offs between RDBMSes and NoSQL, with a focus on the merits of the former. If you are in a position to give advice to software engineers early in their career, consider telling them that Relational Databases aren't dinosaurs, they're sharks.

Maybe it is no conincidence that I also bookmarked Kellan Elliott-McCrea list of Questions for a new technology in the same week.

Allen Downey has published over a dozend textbooks books on computer and data science topics. He generously makes them available for free under Green Tea Press, print versions of many of his books are also published via O'Reilly and No Starch.

Andrew Healeys post about on A Tiny Project, From Inception to Deployment is in my eyes examplary with regard to many aspects: the chosen scope, balance of explanation, visualization and showing working code and the overall length. Frankly that is the kind of writing on software I aspire to do more often, as I am often struggling with that very balance. Either I become lost in line-of-code-level minutiae or am rambling in the vague, most often ending with an article being canned, or lingering forever in the limbo that is my drafts folder...

John Hoare has a word of advice for those of us who maintain personal websites: Design for Creation. The gist, for those in a hurry: a good design helps you write and publish. And a bad design is one which gets in the way, and makes sharing your ideas difficult.

I've intentionally put that advice prior to sending you down the rabbit holes that Wouter Groeneveld has collected in Cool Things People Do With Their Blogs. Consider yourself warned ;)

And a last one, that is also from the links of week 19/2022, but as I don't hot-link image resources on general principle, I've put is as a copy on my site. I use memes rather sparingly, but this one is pure gold that I've sent to quite a few of my coworkers at appropriate points in time: