Happy Friday!

Welcome to this week's edition of my newsletter. There's a couple of exciting announcements, the blog roundup, and fun things I found on the internet.

Got a new job!

As some of you might know, I started my new job as a software engineer at Cure.fit this week. The first few days have been a whirlwind of intros and catchups, and I'm loving the feeling of being back in startup mode and ready to hustle alongside some smart team-mates.

As a fitness enthusiast myself, I'm excited to be working in the online/offline fitness space. I admit I wasted some hours going over the fitness database to discover some new workouts :)

Got my first patron!

A huge shoutout to Chrys for becoming my first supporter on Patreon! This really has had me over the moon for the entire week.Chrys has been a strong supporter of my writing through the last few months and this is really the icing on the cake. Thank you Chrys!

If you like what I've been writing, you can join her in showing some love. 

From the blog

Blogging time was scarce this week because of all the stuff that goes on in joining a new workplace, but I did manage to publish a little piece on what Steve Yegge calls the "Golden rule of Platform" (aka Eat your own dogfood). I keep on stressing the importance of this and the concepts on "external programmability" because between these two, they form the essential and necessary criteria for a platform architecture to arise. The post explicitly lays out what the golden rule is, why it is so critical, and how we can and should apply it. Check it out.

Reading now

I set up a brand new section on the website called "Reading now" which I intend to keep updated with what I'm reading, what I have read, and what I intend to read next. This replaces the google sheet I was maintaining earlier. It's a little more effort, but worth it I think.

From the great interweb

1. Deterministic Aperture method for client side load balancing - A ton of gold in this Twitter article on the specific algorithm and general problems of doing client side load balancing fairly and efficiently.
2. Managing microservice complexity : This is a deep and interesting take on managing complexity in microservice architectures. This theme continues to become more and more commonplace and popular.
3. The theory of the firm : I was recently introduced to Ronald Coase and his theory of the firm and I must say that rarely have I read so much power packed into so fw words. I especially recommend his essays The nature of the Firm and The Problem of Social Cost. Trust me that it is worth it spending a weekend reading them.
4. Smruti Patel writes a superb essay on measuring and understanding the velocity of an engineering team. 
5. Can big social media companies move away from the ad based model? Wired seems to think that they can. But Dare Obasanjo disagrees.

That's it for this week folks. Happy weekend!

-Kislay