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Happy Friday!
How’s everyone doing? Great, I hope. The weekend is here, and so is your weekly round-up of what I wrote on the blog and some of the cool stuff I found on the internet.
I managed to write two articles this week, which makes for a very productive week. But I am beginning to wonder if three mails a week is too much for you people. So for now I have decided that I will not send out email updates every time I publish a new article. The only email you receive from me will be this weekly missive. I will of course share the article on my social media accounts (Twitter, LinkedIn, HN, Reddit, Patreon). If you prefer the email route though, just drop a reply to this mail and I will continue sending the latest post to your inbox.
Onwards and upwards!
From the blog
- I published the third episode of the “For the Layman” series, and this one is a biggie. I tackle the greatest question of them all - “What is programming?”. Writing this one was a lot of one - got reminded of a lot of the basic digital electronics I studied all those years ago in college. Article Link
- Logs are a great way to debug programs, but I have found them iffy as a means to Observability. And yet, logging is one of the primary ways we monitor our software in production. I propose a paradigm for effective logging where instead of thinking “what to log for observability”, we ask “what are my system’s inner boundaries, and what events happen there”. Check it out - Article Link
From the great interweb
- Will Larson argues that migrations are only way to fix tech debt at scale. I thoroughly disagree with the assessment (having experienced the migration treadmill at Uber personally), but he does make some very solid points about building large software systems and teams. Let me know what you think on this.
- I came across this fantastic Twitter thread on how leveling the playing field by adopting a platform centric approach super-charged third party revenues on Amazon. The Golden rule of Platforms is eat your own dogfood, and it’s good to hear and learn from these platformization war stories.
- Simon Wardley (of the Wardley Maps fame) has this great article about how Amazon is eating software which is eating the world.
- For Naval Ravikant fans, the Navalmanack is (yet another) compilation of a lot of what he has said and written over the years.
That's it for this week folks. Happy weekend!
-Kislay
