I’ve got a fresh blog post for you this week that came out of a conversation I had with a recently promoted CTO: AMA: What books do you recommend for the new CTO?. I’d love to hear if you’ve got any other recommendations you’d put on that list.
Tech
Understanding Real-World Concurrency Bugs in Go
Empirical research on the kinds of concurrency bugs Go programmers write. I found it particularly interesting to learn that channels make it more, not less, likely that you’ll get something wrong in concurrent code.
DSHR’s Blog: It Isn’t Just Cryptocurrency Mining
Interesting analysis of the energy use of all the different kinds of computing going on in the world. Spoiler: it’s a lot and it’s growing fast.
Cloud Irregular: IAM Is The Real Cloud Lock-In
I had not really thought about IAM in the same way as Active Directory: a massive complexity trap and vector for lock-in. Oh well. Nothing to do about it now I guess.
Using Custom React Hooks to Simplify Forms
This is a nice and clear tutorial on how to rewrite forms to use the new React Hooks.
Formally Specifying UIs
This post shows how you can easily (well, more easily than I expected) specify UI transitions in a way that can help you resolve navigation bugs. If your app has some complex navigation or other kinds of state machines this could be really helpful to you.
Business & Management
15 lessons from our first $15 million
Great to see details about a small team making a big impact. Useful read for the boot/fundstrapper types in the audience.
Kung Fu
Kung Fu is a long collection of various thoughts on doing startups and I agree with quite a lot of them. Worth spending some time working through them.
How to run an efficient and effective All Hands meeting
Mathilde shares the template her company uses for all hands meetings. Looks useful for founders of growing teams. Love the way they re-introduce old hires if there are no new hires to introduce.
Ikea: Price first, design later
It’s price before product, period
A couple of strong examples on why you should work backwards from the price you want to charge when designing any product.
How to evolve an engineering organization.
This is a bit of a Will Larson meta post, tying together a bunch of past posts into a helpful framework for evolving engineering teams over time.
Culture
Mo’ Moral, Mo’ Panic: the very predictable reaction to Momo
My favourite part of this article is taking the quotes from various past media panics and redacting what the actual thing parents are worried about. I got 0% of them right.
Data-driven solutions to the notorious 304 bus route
I applaud the author’s dedication to solving their own tedious daily bus trip.
What happened to broadband in Australia?: NBN Co’s former CEO on how the Coalition broke the internet
This essay made me sad about Australia but happy that I live in a suburb that got the NBN before the change in government.
Do You Believe in Sharing?
History of the idea of “the tragedy of the commons”. Turns out, the guy behind it is a bit of a garbage human and that he got the idea wrong. Zero for two.
Contractually Obligated Nautical Fact
Best Submarine Nonfiction Books
Who doesn’t need a list of amazing true stories about submarines in their life? Not me.
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