Some handy tips in here.

Maciej Ceglowski:

The real story in this mess is not the threat that algorithms pose to Amazon shoppers, but the threat that algorithms pose to journalism. By forcing reporters to optimize every story for clicks, not giving them time to check or contextualize their reporting, and requiring them to race to publish follow-on articles on every topic, the clickbait economics of online media encourage carelessness and drama. This is particularly true for technical topics outside the reporter’s area of expertise.

Henry Ward:

I have long felt there is a shadow org chart, much like a shadow economy, where employees trade ideas, give direction, offer help, and spread culture. This shadow org chart is built bottom up by employees and is very different from the top down hierarchical org chart set by me.

I wanted to map this shadow org chart and find employees who have disproportionate levels of influence relative to their hierarchical position. I also wanted to see the influence centers and decision makers, and the directional current between them and the rest of the company.

Some fascinating analysis and data visualisation of a graph of influence.

An algorithm for splitting and sharing secrets.

John Lanchester:

The researchers found quite simply that the more people use Facebook, the more unhappy they are.

…

His idea was that if the price is falling that means the market is working, and no questions of monopoly need be addressed. This philosophy still shapes regulatory attitudes in the US and it’s the reason Amazon, for instance, has been left alone by regulators despite the manifestly monopolistic position it holds in the world of online retail, books especially.

…

I’ve spent time thinking about Facebook, and the thing I keep coming back to is that its users don’t realise what it is the company does. What Facebook does is watch you, and then use what it knows about you and your behaviour to sell ads.

…

Facebook is in the surveillance business. Facebook, in fact, is the biggest surveillance-based enterprise in the history of mankind.

Sage.

A look at the internal data structure Emacs uses to represents buffers.

Management and leadership lessons.

They kill me.

David Copeland:

Our goal should be to reduce these issues—we’ll never be truly rid of them. The first step is self-awareness. Ask yourself:

• “Do I know what I’m doing?”
• “Do I have a plan?”
• “Is this the simplest thing I could do?” (note: Simple ain’t easy)
• “What is the problem I’m trying to solve?”

Brandur Leach:

Versioning is always a compromise between improving developer experience and the additional burden of maintaining old versions. We strive to achieve the former while minimizing the cost of the latter, and have implemented a versioning system to help us with it. Let’s take a quick look at how it works.

Explicitly modeling changes between versions via a DSL.

About PumpkinDB:

PumpkinDB is essentially a database programming environment, largely inspired by core ideas behind MUMPS. Instead of M, it has a Forth-inspired stack-based language, PumpkinScript. Instead of hierarchical keys, it has a flat key namespace and doesn’t allow overriding values once they are set.

The core ideas behind PumpkinDB stem from the so called lazy event sourcing approach which is based on storing and indexing events while delaying domain binding for as long as possible. That said, the intention of this database is to be a building block for different kinds of event sourcing systems, ranging from the classic one (using it as an event store) all the way to the lazy one (using indices) and anywhere in between.

John Allspaw:

In my experience, when an architecture review brings attention to a problem and proposed solutions from multiple perspectives, decisions become less controversial. When a decision appears to be obvious to a broad group (“Question: should we (or should we not) take backups of critical databases? Decision: Yes.”) how a decision gets made almost disappears.

Extending Haskell to support dependent types.

Beautiful things.