More Interesting Links - December 2019

  • Why invest in creating a new systems programming language? According to Microsoft, the answers are security, and legacy:
  • Based on the most recent SQL ConstantCare stats, what versions of SQL are in the wild? As of December 2019, not a whole lot of 2019, and even 2017 is in a minority (15%). Big boxes (>33 cores) are also notably absent (5%). As someone used to working with 2017 (soon 2019) on some really big boxes, I wonder where my big-box brethren are.
  • Liz Fong-Jones with an impassioned plea to write less code, and instead see if you can first start by composing, or engineering a solution.
  • Taking composition to an extreme, this thought-provoking write-up of Déjà Vu covers academic work that attempts to make building web apps an exercise in selecting the right legos:
  • Charticulator is an open source visualization generator - the learning curve is a little steep, but the gallery ably demonstrates the breadth of visualizations possible.
  • Monzo's progression framework is an excellent engineering ladder to draw inspiration from (plus a bunch of other roles). Backed by a GatsbyJS app over markdown files if you want to make it your own.
  • This board contains a bunch of items that either increased momentum, or failed but taught the team something new. Love the framing, and think there are a lot of really interesting ideas (on both sides!). The ideas were sourced from a workshop involving product managers from various organizations.
  • State of the art privacy protection in web browsers is getting pretty sophisticated. This article on Fingerprinting and privacy budgets from Brave has me in two minds - I care deeply about privacy, but as an operator occasionally tasked with separating bots from real users, I can imagine some of these techniques making that task a little (lot) harder.
  • If you like reading SaaS S-1 breakdowns (who doesn't?), you should follow Alex Clayton's blog: