Interesting Links - October 2020

Keavy McMinn shares some great examples of what senior technical leadership can look like (all engineering career ladders should not lead to management!).
In addition to being a pretty terrifying read from a security perspective, this fascinating journey through the process of discovering a vulnerability in TeamViewer offers a glimpse at a pretty exciting red-team engagement.
7 helpful design tips that should be useful even if you profess to have no design talent (raises hand)
Ever wondered why Mozilla shows up in so many user agents (even when you're not using Firefox)? - the history of the browser user-agent string will clue you in.
If you enjoyed basecs, you'll probably enjoy it's distributed systems cousin baseds.
An incredible introduction to networking for programmers from routing down to the physical (analog!) layer.
Unlike in RPGs, side quests in reality are pretty key to advancing the 'main story' (getting stuff done).
Rick Branson argues that you you shouldn't count production incidents if you want to improve quality.
When someone tells you they're not biased, perhaps you could suggest this thorough article that reminds us we still have a lot of work to do to remove gender bias in tech.
- And once you get past that lack of bias, maybe have a discussion on meritocracy (hint: it's a a fallacy).
Corp.com is up for sale, and that's a bit of a problem if your Active Directory domain is configured in a certain way (a way which corresponds to a set of defaults proposed by Microsoft in the past!).
In addition to being an (extremely) fast JavaScript bundler, esbuild has a fantastic set of architecture docs that (for a relatively short document) gave me a clear picture of how a bundler works.
Maggie Appleton's site is a growing collection of illustrated essays as well as a digital garden that serve as both great introduction to topics, works of art, and novel metaphors that may help concepts stick (from React hooks to databases).
If you've ever had mixed feelings about Object/Relational-Mapping then you'll enjoy the essay The Vietnam of computer science. Just don't expect a clear resolution at the end.
Trying to understand how accelerated database recovery works is far easier once you've read this article from Forrest McDaniel. The animations bring the processes to life in a way no amount of testing (or re-reading whitepapers) could.
And finally, three great papers covered by the the morning paper:
- Meaningful Availability introduces windowed user-uptime as a better way of measuring service availability.
- Extending relational query processing with ML inference is all embedding ML in a database engine. Using SQL Server cores to run ML sounds pretty expensive, but if it can be fast enough to offset the need to ship the data around, maybe moving the model to the data is the way to go.
- When you might be rolling out 600 releases a day, how do you spot the bad ones? Gandalf is Azure's answer, and it does a pretty impressive job.