- Jeff Dean: Exciting Trends in Machine Learning – A worthwhile watch on YouTube though more a retrospective on how we got here than where we are going; which is great since the pace of innovation in this space is demolishing predictions so fast and any “future of AI” video has a shelf life of only a few months
- How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds – A bit of a dramatic title, though I suppose “How Google lost interest in RSS as everything was moving to social networks” might have been less interesting. I have strong love for RSS and had even written an RSS reader way back using Google Reader’s unofficial API. I have thoughts but will hold those for a more dedicated post on that.
- Project of the week: RSS-is-dead.lol: Speaking of RSS, this project is kinda cool: it navigates your social graph on Mastodon and finds RSS feeds of folks that account is following. If only my RSS reader was still around, I could actually use those discovered links :). Here is my profile in case you want to see it in action but don’t have a Mastodon account.
- BlueSky opens up to federation: Bluesky might be the social network I most agree with philosophically, but find it boring enough to never actually go there. The fact that I can have a domain based account there is great (you can follow me @arpitonline.com there). The federation implementation seems good at first glance but will have to dive in more later maybe (if it survives the wrath of Mastodon fans)
- Please, enough with the dead butterflies: Speaking of BlueSky, someone on Hacker News pointed a link to this pretty great post on how most artwork about butterflies actually draw their wings in a position that is only observed in dead butterflies. I’ll never get that thought out of my head now.
Category: Things-I-read
Good reads – Week of Feb 18, 2014
Dev
- Dart 3.3 and Flutter 3.19– I am one of a very small set of people running a Flutter web app in production, so excited to see work going into better JS interoperability and a path to WASM. Impeller support for Android is neat to see as well.
- How Custom RenderObjects can make your life easier (FlutterCon) – One of my aha moments with Android was when I finally understood how the layout engine worked (which led to a custom framework that was very popular for a while). I am starting to feel the need for a similar aha moment with Flutter given how much widget code is in our codebase that feels unoptimized.
- Micropayment capabilities in Chromium – I read this on a forum (fine, Reddit) and there was a lot of criticism of this move, but if folks don’t want ads, then you have to let publishers at least offer payment based access. I remember the “small fractional payments” was the original pitch for Bitcoin but it’s interesting to see the Web Monetization API finally be a thing 15 years later.
Design
- GitButler product demo – Unlike most apps for working with Git that faithfully surface Git’s capabilities but don’t really think about user mental models or approaches when working with it, GitButler takes a different approach and tries a few new ideas around developer workflows. I like it.
- MyMind’s share UI – Very calming confirmation screen when you share something to MyMind (a personal notes/images app with AI).
Misc
- The Tarnished History of Mac Tonight – I missed this part of Americana (being in India during its prime). Now I know way too much about this forgotten Mac mascot
- The Art of James Gurney – I have never heard of Dinotopia earlier, but found it this week and the art blew me away.
Things I read – Week of Feb 11, 2024
Dev
- A deep dive into Strapi’s architecture (strapi.io) : Strapi calls itself a headless CMS but it is more a web framework with a built-in CMS (kind of like Django). We are using it a fair bit at work and it’s been decent so far. At some point I’ll write a more personal “lessons learned” post but in the meanwhile, this is a good introduction to the system’s design.
- Dart Vector DB (github.com): No clue if this is any good, but glad to see an on-device Vector DB for Flutter apps.
- The Undercover Generalist: Good post that highlights that most job reqs ask for specialists when most of the industry really needs generalists. The book Range is also a good read on that topic.
Misc
- The incredible shrinking podcast industry (semafor.com): Apple stopped auto-downloading episodes of podcasts if you didn’t listen to the last few episodes which has played havoc with the reported numbers of various podcasts. It seems like the right move by Apple even if a little fore-warning would have been nice.
- Ask Reddit – What album do you consider perfect from beginning to end? (reddit.com): Found some gems on this one. My vote would be for Pearl Jam’s Ten.
- Why Do We Drink Eggnog During the Holidays? (YouTube): A fun look at how eggnog became a holiday tradition in the US.
Things I read this week (Feb 4th, 2024)
Dev
- Introducing Pkl (pkl-lang.org): Big news from Apple this week. Oh, well a second one besides the Apple Vision I guess ;). A new programming language for managing application configuration. I have never worked with any codebase that needed it but good to know of it even if their utility is debated. (Hacker News discussion link)
- Ruby’s Exceptional Creatures (exceptionalcreatures.com): Explore Ruby exceptions with cute anthropomorphized characters representing the various Exception classes. A friendly resource for someone starting out with Ruby.
- Figma’s Vector Networks (alexharri.com): Figma’s innovative approach to their Pen tool. I barely understood the math, but appreciate both the algorithm and the functionality
- The Big Little Guide to Message Queues (sudhir.io): A good introduction to Message Queue concepts and some details on various options when choosing a MQ stack for your app. Also some interesting threads on the Hacker News board
Design
- Designer News is Dead (solomon.io): I still have DN bookmarked but its been ages since I went there. Still sad to see it go.
- AI-generated portraits question the influence of historic figures in an era of smartphones (designboom.com): Wonder what Einstein’s favorite app is.
Misc
- Forget BoredApes And CryptoPunks, NFTs Are Making A Corporate Comeback (Forbes): I have been exploring collectibles for a long time and how they can power consumer experiences besides the speculative value space. I’ll share more about that here soon but there this article discusses the larger trend of corporations looking into collectibles in general.
- India’s ancient carpet weaving industry meets AI (bbc.com): Interesting look inside the Kashmir carpet industry and its changing face thanks to AI.
Things I read this week (Jan 28, 2024)
Dev
- The Modern AI Stack: Design Principles for the Future of Enterprise AI Architectures (Menlo Ventures): Good quick read on AI stack, maturity models and future of AI as per Menlo Ventures. One missing point there, which I think will be big, is AI at the edge.
- OpenAI’s CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over (Wired.com): This was a surprising read, given that the last few famous models all seem to rely on the same underlying architectures and just keep throwing more and more data into them. What replaces the Transformer?
- The Rise of Unix. The Seeds of its Fall (YouTube): 16 min video on the invention of the Unix operating system. I had heard the story before but it still cracks me up that Ken Thompson built the core of UNIX in a week when his wife went on vacation and he had a lot of time on his hands.
Design
- In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox (Tonsky.me): Three things in life were permanent: death, taxes and checkboxes being square. Vision OS will have circular checkboxes?! What madness is this?
- The new Hey calendar (hey.com): I am not a fan of 37 Signals/Basecamp’s design aesthetic but they are at least trying some new ideas. What do you think of the new calendar?
Misc
NFTs are about to take a bigger role in your expanding online life (MarketWatch.com): Slightly wishful thinking by the author here but there is a lot of interesting projects around in the fairly niche community of NFT enthusiasts. The tech is fairly proven, but regulatory uncertainty, bad press, and hard on-ramps into the ecosystem are holding it back from going mainstream.
Binoculars with built in image recognition: Would love to gift one of these to my father-in-law who is an avid birdwatcher, but at $5K it might be a bit much ;). He already has a smart bird feeder though.
Disney’s HoloTile floor (YouTube): The latest in tech that could be used to let users walk around in VR and yet not physically move. It’s cool. I want someone to make the Jamiroquai’s Virtual Insanity video using it 🙂
// follow for updates:
Things I read this week (Jan 20, 2024)
Dev
- Enabling branch deployments through IssueOps with GitHub Actions (Github.com) – This week there was a lot of debate on the right model we need to adopt for shipping software. While the first couple of production deploys have followed the traditional merge “deploy main at end of sprint” model, Github’s “push to prod on merge request” is an interesting approach. I have the draft of a post on my thoughts on it that I’ll share soon.
- Rails World 2023 Opening Keynote – David Heinemeier Hansson (YouTube.com): I am really excited for Rails 8 but am more excited about the Rails team pushing for tech that improves productivity. I am so exhausted by framework-of-the-week conversations.
- The Google Wallet Challenge (YouTube.com): A dev challenge to build something with Google Wallet is fine, but more interesting: I didn’t realize you can push arbitrary data, including custom collectibles, into the wallet (Sample code)
- (Bonus) Using Native Share API in Flutter based Web Apps (arpitonline.com): I wrote a thing that took longer than I thought it would to implement. Some worthwhile learnings though
Design
Best UI / UX for subscribing users to web push notifications (Pushpad.com): We might have to add web push notifications into our web app soon, and while Firebase makes the engineering much easier, the UX of permission prompts is a bit of the wild west.
Misc
The myths we tell ourselves about American farming (vox.com): An insightful, though depressing read, on Agricultural Exceptionalism, or how our romanticized notions of farmers and farming are allowing that industry to operate under a different set of environmental and labor laws that hurt our society.
How Spotify helped turn Afrobeats into a global phenomenon (restofworld.org): I had never heard of Afrobeats before but have been listening to it this week and it’s kinda neat
// Follow for updates
Things I read this week (Jan 14th)
Tech
- Understanding the difference between find_or_create_by and create_or_find_by: For the project at work right now we were debating the best way to approach the “find user unless they already exist” implementation (we are using a Node based framework which we have to customize since our service is checking other services to validate the existence of a user). When in doubt, I try to see how Rails does it and I actually did not know it had two different implementations of the requirement based on whether the accidental creation of duplicates via a race condition was acceptable or not. Interesting read.
- The Untold Story of SQLite (CoRecursive Podcast): Fascinating conversation with Richard Hipp, creator of SQLite.
- The Effective Engineer (YouTube): Originally published 8 years ago, still a great watch. Edmond Lau talks about 5 approaches to work that would make you a more effective engineer: 1. Optimize for learning, 2. Invest in iteration speed, 3. Validate your ideas aggressively, 4. Minimize operational burden and 5. Building a great engineering culture.
Design
- List of UX Research Templates – 12 years ago when I was working in the UX team, I used to be very involved with the UX Research teams, building the prototypes that would be tested with actual users. That said, I wasn’t that involved with the UX Research process. In my current project, we are doing some ad-hoc UX Research. This list of templates could be very useful.
Misc
- Inside The New York Times’ Big Bet on Games (Vanity Fair): I spent a part of last year working on some gaming product concepts and so am very interested in how this space is evolving. This piece was an interesting insight into how the games products (Crossword, Spelling Bee, Wordle, Digit, Connection, etc) are run inside the Times. The Times may not be the first company to come to mind when thinking of gaming but interesting to see how games is becoming a meaningful part of the Times’ offerings
Things I read this week (Jan 6, 2023)
Engineering:
- Figma’s database migration from one giant DB to multiple vertically partitioned databases – My knowledge of database-level aspects of applications is just about functional, relying more on managed services or backend teams to provide my application level code a robust api to work with. However, with my latest project at work, I am starting to look deeper into database elements just to be aware of the tradeoffs we might need to make in the future. This was a great read on how the Figma team transitioned their giant db to a number of vertically partitioned smaller ones and instead of splitting each table across many databases, moved groups of tables onto their own databases.
- Computer Scientist Explains Zero Knowledge Proofs in 5 Levels of Difficulty (YouTube) – I really like this YouTube series by Wired that explains technical concepts in ascending levels of complexity/detail. ZKPs are a big topic in my community of Web3 devs and this was a great video that almost everyone can take some learnings away from.
- Database Fundamentals – A great “from the ground up” read on database technology and concepts. I specially enjoyed the part on various algorithms the database storage engines use.
Design
- The Genius Design of Dutch Money (YouTube) – It’s a bummer that these are no longer in circulation with Netherlands moving to the Euro, but the focus on clarity and fun make these some of the most interestingly designed currency notes
Fun
- Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Book) – Not surprised that this has won numerous awards and is often talked about as one of the best Science Fiction books of all time. Children of Time explores what happens when a terraforming project goes wrong and a virus designed to speed up simian evolution accidentally ends up evolving spiders instead. I really liked the exploration of civilized spider societies and how their technology would be based on very different primitives than humans’.