2019#13 Readings of the week

May 19, 2019 3 minutes read | 550 words by Ruben Berenguel

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Functional programming, adtech, history. Expect a similar wide range in the future as well. You can check all my weekly readings by checking the tag here . You can also get these as a weekly newsletter by subscribing here.

Ancient Chinese Buildings Are Held Together With Rice

As everyone who has prepared sticky rice and forgotten to clean the pan quickly knows.

‘I’d Have These Extremely Graphic Dreams’: What It’s Like To Work On Ultra-Violent Games

Fatality burnout.

The Artistry of China’s Ivory Puzzle Balls

I’ve seen one from really close and they are amazing

Bristol academic cracks Voynich code

There was a rebuttal of this approach close to 2 years ago, but it still sounds interesting. Also, I’d expect phys.org to be somewhat trustable.

Technical Debt? Probably not.

Pay it off. Or not.

Scala’s Future.successful: Do Not Block Your Future Success

Beware the future!

The Functional Scala Concurrency Challenge

Some of the solutions look neat, and there is something to be learnt in the diversity.

Technical overview of ads viewability measurement methods

I have always been interested into how ad viewability (if an ad is seen by a user or not) works. Now I know.

GraalVM installation and setup on macOS

GraalVM is a new Java runtime and compiler, which is somewhat faster than the normal JDK, and offers some really fancy cross-language options. I had been using RC9 or 10. It was time to update. I usually use Enterprise Edition for anything local, but can switch per-terminal with several aliases I have (j8, j11, jgree and jgrce) in case something breaks or I want to try another.

Caire - a content aware image resize library

Seam carving is so cool. I wrote a cropping system once, using PILs Haar cascade based object detection. It works pretty well for automated creation of ads, but seam carving is way better for almost all other cases.

🎥 Flare - Optimizing Apache Spark for Scale-Up Architectures and Medium-Size Data

I’m scared this will become a closed source, or business-on-top. Code is not available, but results are awesome. Luckily, the papers are (why the code is not as part of the papers is another question).

🎥 helm-edit

I had used multiple-cursors (and expand-region) in emacs many times, although I had a hard time making it work properly in spacemacs for a while. helm-edit works better already in spacemacs, so, big win!

🎥 Understanding Query Plans and Spark UIs

I knew everything in this video already, but it covers lots. Give it a look.

🎥 What the ƒ is a monad

Although focused on Java, it’s very well explained for any language. Of course, if you have do syntax or for comprehensions, better.

📚 The Great Mental Models

The audiobook by Shane Parrish, of FS Blog. It was good, but I expected something longer.

📚 The art of thinking in systems

If you have read Donna Meadows Thinking in Systems, this won’t give you anything new. And I’d rather recommend TiS.

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