Thoughts On Hiring Mandates

D&I Hiring Mandates by Jason Wong

Discoveries In The 10s

National Geographic's Top 20 scientific discoveries of the decade

A little more abstract than I usually post, nonetheless I found it a fascinating list and wanted to share. Warning: a bit of popup hell to get through.

Meditations On Data

The Selfish Dataome from Nauitlus.com

Another post that's outside of the the scope of what I usually share here, but is also too good not to share.

Today, by some accounts, our species generates about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data a day. 

Need Ideas For What To Explore?

Work on these things (now, and fast): https://t.co/0ae1rKe7k1

— tylercowen (@tylercowen) December 23, 2019

A Look Back At The Last Ten Years

A decade in review in tech by Cindy Sridharan

A different format this week. I got so into this post on the 10s that all my best links of the week referenced the list of adoptions and innovations in the teens.

The Type Strikes Back

Why Our Brains See the World as "Us" versus "Them" from Scientific American

This one devolved into a low key religious war at my current shop, with all sorts of interesting undertones. Absolutes lurk on either extreme of the argument. Grass-is-always-greener thinking peppers the spectrum. Rational arguments include acceptance that there are appropriate use cases for either typing paradigm, and weight the tradeoffs between the two specific to a situation.

Putting back the SQL in the NoSQL

Why SQL is beating NoSQL, and what this means for the future of data from Timescale blog

There's a bit of a community religious war happening in this space as well, though I've been abstracted away from it for the most part. At my shop we have a polyglot persistence stack that includes a heavy dose of relational, but also includes quite a few NoSQL solutions, especially Cassandra.

Continuous Integration

Book Review: Accelerate by Adam Hawkins

Thoughts On High Performing Teams

Gimme an “A”! — Why STEM Isn’t Enough by Alexandra West

From the post:

The top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: 

- being a good coach

- communicating and listening well

- possessing insights into others (including others different values and points of view)

- having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues

- being a good critical thinker and problem solver

- being able to make connections across complex ideas

The Dip

The life of a project pic.twitter.com/3yzCarw5Xp

— Addy Osmani (@addyosmani) January 25, 2020

Human Behavior Worth Considering

Eight Short Studies On Excuses by Scott Alexander

Thoughts on approaching a systems design interview

Systems design interview tips:
🧐 Verify assumptions (use case, # of users, data storage etc)
👌Start with a simple architecture
⏳Identify bottlenecks & verify which ones to address next
🔄Iterate on the design
🛠Go down the rabbithole, to specific technologies & how they work

— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) January 10, 2020