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Happy Friday!

Hope all of you are keeping safe and staying sane. I am settling into my new workplace, beginning to understand my project, and almost ready to start bugging everyone about thinking and building platforms :) There’s a lot to do, and some sharp folks to do it with, so life is good.

Here’s this week’s roundup of my blog and things worth reading from the internet.

From the blog

This week I published the second episode of my “For the layman” series. This time I talk about “The Cloud” in dead simple terms. If you have been hearing about “using the cloud” or “cloud computing” or other similar things and did not know what it meant exactly - you should definitely read this fun article. Check it out.

Reading now

I wasn’t feeling up to reading any heavy duty stuff, so I ended up finishing 1634 : The Galileo Affair, the fifth book in the Ring of Fire series. Though not as awesome as 1632 and 1633, this book breathed some life back into the series for me. The residents of the West Virginian town Grantsville take their mayhem to Venice this time, trying to rescue Galileo and setting up trade partnerships at the same time. Well worth spending a lazy evening or two

From the great interweb

1. If you are interested in statistics, Information Theory for Intelligent People and Bayesian Reasoning for Intelligent People are two excellent articles from the Santa Fe Institute. Each covers the basics of its respective topic briefly but effectively, and forms a good introduction to it. HN has a great discussion around the information theory article.
2. I’m a great fan of asynchronous programming, but callback hell has been a real problem in Java land (and in every other language). EA has perhaps solved that problem with their ea-async library which brings async-await to Java. I’m looking forward to doing something with this.
3. Camille Fourier shares her experiences in building platform teams and keeping them product/customer centric instead of technology centric. The distinction is critically important for “internal” platform teams which aren’t always exposed to the eventual customers.
4. For some weekend inspiration, here’s a fun guide to how to teach yourself new things.

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

-Kislay