MP

Selected Reads (2020-09-27)

Here is a selection of articles and other media that I’ve found interesting since the last installment of this series. I’ve started providing archive links in addition to the original URLs, in case in the future the original sites change URLs, go down, etc. Please prefer the original links when possible.

Alien Signals

This is a pleasantly nostalgic look back at his childhood experience of listening to nighttime radio and waiting for zines, and the feeling of mystery and suspense those things engendered.

Column Names as Contracts

This article goes in depth into the utility of standardizing column names in a data schema, to the point where it’s possible to treat the names as contracts, even building automated tooling around them. In addition to being interesting in the specific, it makes a good general point about the value of standardization in naming.

Peeking Inside a Rust Enum

An extremely in-depth article about Rust enums, with deep comparisons to C enums, introspection of their layout in memory, and some of the benefits of Rust enums.

My FOSS Story

The author of this post is a prolific open source contributor, having written ripgrep, the most popular Rust regular expression engine, the most popular Rust CSV parser, the main Golang TOML parser, a property testing library for Rust, an X window manager in Golang, and so on. This article chronicles his experience contributing to open source, maintaining projects, and so on. It’s a great, measured look at the experience from the perspective of a well respected member of the community. This article was published way back in January, but I think an update put it back into my RSS feed, and I figured there’s no harm in re-highlighting it.

The Overwhelming Racism of COVID Coverage

This post calls out the western media for in large part completely failing to report on the relative successes with COVID management seen in a number of non-white, non-wealthy, non-western countries, such as Thailand, Vietnam, Rwanda, and Ghana, making the rather difficult to refute case that the media tends to present the success of those countries, when it’s mentioned at all, as being due to luck or genetics, failing to consider the details of these countries public health responses, which have often been comprehensive and, apparently, quite effective.

A Concurrency Cost Hierarchy

This is a fantastic article going into the depths of relative performance of various low-level synchronization primitives in situations of low, medium, and high thread saturation. An absolute must-read and must-bookmark for anyone needing to choose between atomics, mutexes, or other synchronization primitives in their code.

An Introduction to Data-oriented Design with Rust

A nice primer on some of the ways that you can optimize your data structures to enable faster processing, fewer cache misses, etc. This kind of data-oriented design has the potential to significantly improve the performance of processing large amounts of data or smaller amounts of data in hot paths, and seems like a really useful set of skills to be aware of.

White House-CDC tensions explode as Trump contradicts its leadership

You’d think this sort of thing would stop surprising me, but the degree to which a significant portion of the country seem to be just fine with the White House intercepting basic science and public health messaging and spinning it to its own ends continue to floor me, especially when it’s as flagrant as this.

The Era of Visual Studio Code

This article makes the case that VSCode is ushering in a new era of text editor dominance, brought on by having perfected the extension model and having the benefit of continuous open source development by Microsoft. It’s a little breathlessly uncritical for my taste, but I do think it’s worth considering whether VSCode may be the IDE/editor outside of vim and emacs to potentially achieve long-term success.

The Purpose of College

This “Fireside Friday” post by Bret Devereux looks at the value proposition of college in modern American society, particularly what it is about a college education that remains a strong signal for employers. Like everything he writes, this is perceptive, nuanced, and interesting.

Created: 2020-09-27

Tags: academics, engineering, open-source, politics, rust, selected-reads