Today, the New York Times’ SundayReview features a great column by Matthew B. Crawford: The Cost of Paying Attention. Attention is a resource; a person has only so much of it […] What if we saw attention in the same way that we saw air or water, as a valuable resource that we hold in common? Perhaps, if we could envision an “attentional commons,” then we could figure out how to protect it....
Sam Altman has a great short series on the development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI). Machine intelligence, Part 1 is on why machine intelligence is something that we should be afraid of while Part 2 is on what we should do about it. And then there’s Technology predictions, the perfect closer.
Today must read is Nine Things to Expect from HTTP/2, brewed for us by one of the HTTP/2 core designers, Mark Nottingham. Ten well spent minutes of your time.
If you have time to read just one thing today, then make sure it is March To Triumph As A Mentor, an essay on Mentoring by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis.
Tom Christie has some very good things to say on how to successfully maintain an open source project without losing sanity. Truth one: There are, and will always be, a non-finite number of possible valid issues to address. Your code can always be better polished, your APIs better defined, and your project more fully featured. Your documentation can always be better. The ecosystem within which your project lives is constantly evolving....
In spite of being a marketing spin and link bait, Heroku article on microservices does a pretty good job at explaining why microservices matter and, at a very high level, what challenges they pose. However, microservices aren’t a silver bullet, and they won’t make a sluggish IT organization fast. While individual services become more robust and less complex, the overall system takes on the many challenges of distributed systems at the network level....
I am not a big fan of top tens but 10 Tips for Better Pull Requests is well worth reading. A good Pull Request involves more than just some code. In most cases, there’s one or more reviewer(s) involved, who will have to review your Pull Request in order to evaluate whether it’s a good fit for inclusion in the code base. Not only must you produce good code, but you must also cater to the person(s) doing the review....
I wasn’t aware that The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is now available with a Creative Common license, free for everyone to enjoy.
Robert C. Martin is at it again this time targeting the (infamous?) Interface construct in a funny way. As both a C# and Python coder I couldn’t agree more. Also, let me quote my fellow polyglot developer Nicola Musatti who went all out on the topic: Some of us have known that for the best part of the last 20 years 😉
Jos de Jong has a great concise write-up on pitfalls and excesses in building reusable software.