2019#1 Readings of the week
4 minutes read | 648 words by Ruben BerenguelIf you know me, you’ll know I have a quite extensive reading list. I keep it in Pocket, and is part of my to do stored in Things3. It used to be large (hovering around 230 items since August) but during Christmas it got out of control, reaching almost 300 items.
That was too much, and I set myself a goal for 2019 to keep it trimmed and sweet. And indeed, since the beginning of the year I have read or canceled 171 articles (122 in the past week, 106 of which were read). That’s a decently sized book!
To help me in this goal, I’ll (or at least I hope) be writing a weekly post about what interesting stuff I have read the past week. Beware, this week may be a bit larger than usual, since I wanted to bring the numbers down as fast as possible. NOTE: The themes are varied. Software/data engineering, drawing, writing. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well.
The Nature of Infinity, and Beyond – Cantor’s Paradise
A short tour through the life of Georg Cantor and his quest for proving the continuum hypothesis. In the end, he was vindicated.
Statistical rule of three
What is a decent estimate of something that hasn’t happened yet? Find the answer here.
Apache Arrow: use of jemalloc
A short technical post detailing why Arrow moved to jemalloc for memory allocation.
Subpixel Text Encoding
This is… unexpected. A font that is 1 pixel wide.
Solving murder with Prolog
I have always been a fan of Prolog, and this is a fun and understandable example if you have never used it.
What Parkour Classes Teach Older People About Falling
Interesting. I’m still young, but I’ll keep this in mind for the future.
Implementing VisiCalc
The detailed story about how VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet) was written.
The military secret to falling asleep in two minutes
I was actually doing something similar since I was like 12. It might be a stretch to say 2 minutes, but works.
Index 1,600,000,000 Keys with Automata and Rust
Super interesting (and long) post about how FSA and FST are used for fast search in Rust (I’m a bit into Rust lately). Also, BurntSushi’s (Andrew Gallant, the author) cat is called Cauchy, something I appreciate as my cat is named Fatou.
How to Draw from Imagination: Beyond References
An excellent piece on gesture drawing and improving your technique.
Anatomy of a Scala quirk
All languages have their WAT, it’s harder to find them in Scala though.
Chaotic attractor reconstruction
An easy example in Python of Takens' embedding theorem
Hello, declarative world
An exploration between imperative and functional, and how declarative fits the landscape
Python with Context Managers
Although I have written tons of Python, I never took the time to either write or understand how context managers work. This one was good.
Raymond Chandler’s Ten Commandments For the Detective Novel
You never know when you may write a detective novel. Ruben and the case of the dead executor
Seven steps to 100x faster
An optimisation tour of a piece of code written in Go, from data structures to allocation pressure.
Writing a Faster Jsonnet Compiler
A semi-technical post by Databricks about Jsonnet and why they wrote their own compiler. Serves as an introduction to Jsonnet (“compilable JSON”) as well.
Bonus
Monoid font and Poet emacs theme
Today I switched from solarized dark and Fira Code Pro to the above. It looks interesting
Poet emacs theme
Newsletter?
I’m considering converting this into a weekly newsletter in addition to a blog post. These days (since RSS went into limbo) most of my regular information comes from several newsletters I’m subscribed to, instead of me going directly to a blog. If this is also your case, subscribe by clicking here and if enough people join I’ll send these every Sunday night or so.