Links Blog

another link dump, some of these have been open for months and need to be closed or forgotten. It’s healthy to pay down the tab debt at least once a quarter.

• 10 Years of Meteor
  • meteor had some good parts but missed the mark on several. I didn’t care for meteor at the time, but did go on to use Apollo GraphQL heavily at Credit Karma. It was ok, but perhaps overly complicated.
  • Sidebar
    • linked from the meteor piece, it’s a daily link aggregator
• Body Margin 8px | Miriam Eric Suzanne
  • a few too many words on the history of browser resets, specifically the 8px body margin
• auth-helpers/packages/nextjs at main · supabase-community/auth-helpers
  • supabase might have finally fixed their auth? I need to update this in [redacted]
• The new wave of React state management
  • everything is new, again. this time it’s state management, because flow was fucked and redux is too repetitive, so we need more of these.
  • pmndrs/zustand: 🐻 Bear necessities for state management in React looks cool though
• virgil/Overview.md at master · titzer/virgil
  • [redacted] has been designing a programming language, so I collected this to send to him
• Google AI Blog: Minerva: Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models
  • more AI research for the pile.
• Things You Should Know About Databases
  • I can’t produce this knowledge a priori, but this tread over territory I was already familiar with from reading Martin Kleppmann’s Warthog book. (Everyone should read the Warthog book.)
• multiprocessio/datastation: App to easily query, script, and visualize data from every database, file, and API.
  • another notebook alternative. under-designed imo.
• Tailscale · Best VPN Service for Secure Networks
  • [redacted] is using this. But does look interesting, trad-VPN is so wasteful
• One-liner for running queries against CSV files with SQLite | Simon Willison’s TILs
  • stoopid sqlite tricks
• AddyOsmani.com - Software Engineering - The Soft Parts
  • thoughtful post from Addy about being a human who also works with other humans and also computers
• Notes on maintaining an internal React component library | Gabe’s blog
• The Bill Gurley Chronicles: VCs, Marketplaces, and Early-Stage Investing
  • This might be the single most informative blog post I have ever read. It summarizes 20 years of Bill Gurley’s blog, which is just nugget after interesting nugget of shrewd analysis and galaxy-brain predictions that were more accurate than not.
• CSS: Flexible Repeating SVG Masks
  • [redacted] designed me something like this for WebRTC.party and I did my own half-baked version and then found this post. For next time.
• I’m All-In on Server-Side SQLite · Fly
  • more SQLite hype
• Local warming - Works in Progress
  • I like the design. The content didn’t stick with me, but the design did.
• Elegant Six-Page Proof Reveals the Emergence of Random Structure | Quanta Magazine
  • I always save the tab on this genre Math shit after I read half of it and move onto something else. I long for the timeline where I studied a bit harder and got the muscle memory worn into me to fully understand this realm instead of feeling like a lost child.
• How to write more clearly, think more clearly, and learn complex material
• How to Freaking Find Great Developers By Having Them Read Code | Freaking Rectangle
  • Lotsa people opine on how to do interviews, or otherwise bemoan the modern leetcode-style panel interview, but this is a novel hot take. Analyzing is better than synthesizing.
• Reliably Send an HTTP Request as a User Leaves a Page | CSS-Tricks - CSS-Tricks
  • Still hard to do! There’s a built-in ping attribute on the anchor tag, but Firefox doesn’t support it.
• Agile and the Long Crisis of Software
  • my favorite dead horse to beat: discourse on project management techniques! though this is a good history, the subject is fraught. It’s a distraction from building.
• What I learned as a hired consultant for autodidact physicists | Aeon Ideas
  • good germ of a story here
• A Rust web server / frontend setup like it’s 2022 (with axum and yew) | Robert Krahn
  • I deeply, deeply want to write Rust but feel like I can’t ever afford to slow down and suffer through the learning curve. I just end up writing JavaScript (TypeScript).
• Two-way writeups: Coda’s secret to shipping fast
  • hey look, more discourse on project management techniques! this is good though, coda makes good tools
• Mapo Tofu | Cult Favorite
  • I want to cook this!
• Sichuan(ish) Celery | Cult Favorite
  • I want to cook this too!
• The SPACE of Developer Productivity - ACM Queue
  • yet another piece adjacent to project management discourse. this time a framework to measure developer productivity. I discussed this with Sean in 2016/17 as being a multi-dimensional gradient descent problem.
• Nadia Asparouhova | Idea machines
  • “effective altruism”
• set -e, -u, -o, -x pipefail explanation
  • I don’t write bash as regularly as I used to (thank god) and I can never remember which of these I need to do. Bash is the pits.