My latest bag of interesting articles and talks I've recently read, watched or listened too (you can check which podcasts I listen to here).
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#NoEstimates (Allen Holub): One of those inspiring talks I wish every manager, CTO and CEO watched, digested and understood. Do yourself a favor and watch it
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AWS Lambda - 3 pro tips for working with Kinesis streams: I found this article very appropiate, because now seems everybody wants to "lambda-everything" and there are good and bad scenarios. Also good tips for kinesis, dead letter queues, etc.
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UUID or GUID as Primary Keys? Be Careful!: I still think UUID benefits outweight the caveats, but probably I'm biased due to past troublesome DB migrations (in which UUIDs saved the day).
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Terraform gotchas and how we work around them: Some colleages at work tried Terraform and found some of the advices useful.
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How does language, memory and package size affect cold starts of AWS Lambda?: Nice comparison, although as you can imagine Java and C# are the slowest ones due to their VM, related booting up.
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Zachary Johnson & Andrew Reitano:NESpectre: The Massively Multi-Haunted NES | JSConf EU 2017: A modded NES that allows multiplayer inputs and hacks, impressive.
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The Ultimate Game Boy Talk (33c3): If you're into Gameboy development, this talk is a rollercoaster of details and features (and a few hints). It is so packed you'll probably watch it twice.
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The Ultimate Commodore 64 Talk: Same as previous but regarding the Commodore-64. Amazing how the visual mode hacks allowed for higher amount of colors, extra sprites and even drawing outside of the "main" screen!
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Securely access AWS Parameter Store from your Elastic Beanstalk Docker containers: Accessing AWS Parameter Store from Docker containers is not straightforward, so this post gives a brief but working approach to do it.
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ev3dev is a Debian Linux-based operating system that runs on several LEGO MINDSTORMS: Great if you own an EV3 and wish to change the OS (no need to override the original one, just format an SD-card).
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With new browser tech, Apple preserves privacy and Google preserves trackers: Sad truth, one sells hardware and the other sells Ads, so privacy is secondary to ad serving and user tracking.
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Scroogled no more: Gmail won’t scan e-mails for ad personalisation: It is probably to avoid more suing and possible fines for privacy violations and regulations, but in the end we "win".
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Postgres full-text search is Good Enough!: If you use Postgres, really worth read about how to properly do full-text search.
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Latest massive ransomware attack was actually something much worse: Interesting details, like it was created to actually destroy data but fake the intentions as ransomware.
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Twitter says Trump's tweet doesn't violate its rules: because we're equal... until we're not and it is convenient to have people breaking the rules in the system (as increments platform engagement)
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Is it possible to host Facebook on AWS?: an attempt to calculate if and how could FB move to AWS
- calculations look a bit broken to me as assume all servers have the same role and this cannot be further away from the truth: everyone uses specialiced servers with different roles.
- Also I directly don't understand the employees per server "metric" ¯_(ツ)_/¯
- Links provided are quite interesting but the article in general is very high-level
- Calculations at the end are more useful to reuse at other scenarios
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You can use the new Chrome 59 dev tools to see what scripts aren't being used: Love this useful new feature!
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Github recently added code owners: Nice feature, although more than owners I prefer "guardians", because code is not mine, but I can be the "reference guy" due to my knowledge about it.
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Hard truths about tech (
http://anna-oz.tumblr.com/post/158300535300/hard-truths-about-tech
): I recommend reading the full article but this is the list of points:- Learning programming is hard
- Self-directed learning is hard
- Attending one workshop or a couple won't turn you into a professional developer
- It takes time: You won't become a developer in 3 months
- Finding your first developer job is hard
- Finding any kind of first job in tech is hard
- Tech interviews are terrifying
- Job search in tech is extra long and frustrating
- Some people won't make it
- You may not become a programmer but your skills are needed elsewhere in tech
- Not everyone has to become a tech speaker
- It's all about connections
- Volunteering won't get you a job
- You will often feel really stupid, you will often be really frustrated
- It's a struggle
- Not everyone has the money to attend a bootcamp or wants to attend a bootcamp
- It takes more than good code for a project/company to succeed
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What Really Happened with Vista: Really interesting article on why Windows Vista was such a disaster despite being a full codebase rewrite and having such high hopes.
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Want a happier workplace? Studies say the best companies do these 5 things every single day:
- Identify what makes your workplace a good place to work
- Establish a learning spirit within the organization
- Establish a culture of open communication and frequent feedback
- Establish a culture that values greater work-life balance
- Establish a culture of praise and recognition
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Amazon's SQS performance and latency: Interesting numbers to at least grasp how fast is SQS.
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Lip-syncing Obama: New tools turn audio clips into realistic video: Really scary article... makes me fear in few years we won't be able to trust the media at all...
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What does your car know about you and will it share your secrets?: And more scary stuff, in this case the telemetry that self-driving cars is storing about everything.
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Mac as a first-class gaming platform: Are we there yet?: TL;DR no, but it's on the right path.
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The Secret of High-Performing Developers: Best highlight: "if you need to debug — you've already lost your way"
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What happened to John Carmack after the book Masters of Doom?: Interesting summary of the thinking of this genious. You don't have to agree with everything he did/promotes, but he's still an incredible developer and engine creator.
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Facebook wants to analyse your emotions as you browse: It is a patent to discreetly take control of the phone/laptop camera to analyse your emotions while you browse the site and serve ads tailored to your reactions.
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China forces its Muslim minority to install spyware on their phones: Scary country, I wouldn't like to live there, there are so many privacy cuts.
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Videos from the recent EuroPython 2015 Italy: Too bad they are not split but per room and day instead :(
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(Now More Than Ever) You Might Not Need jQuery: Interesting to see more and more vanilla JS "powers".
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A hacker stole $31M of Ether — how it happened, and what it means for Ethereum: Very long but instructive post about Ethereum, how it works, and how it was hacked to steal that money. Key summarizing point: "this ecosystem is young and immature. [...] But we're going to have to get there for blockchain to be successful in the long run".
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Games software/hardware over $150B in 2017, $200B by 2021: Incredible numbers, I've been recently reading old videogame magazines from the late 80s and the 90s and it is amazing how they grew from a niche to now being almost everywhere, from a children toy to now even more appealing for adults.
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What Does It Really Take To Track A Million Cell Phones?: Scary conclussions (it is really easy and quick).