Polymath Engineer Weekly #100
Programmer's Brain, Monoids, S3, Domain Driven Design, Logarithms, Biomechanics and Dependent Types
It’s been about 2 years since I started the Polymath Engineer Weekly newsletter. We’re finally at issue #100! 🥳🍻🎉
You have no idea how many things I had to read that don’t even get to show up here. I try to bring mostly high quality information, filtering out a lot of garbage out there… I’m glad I can consistently read cool stuff and reach you all in more than 20 countries. I’m certainly becoming a better engineer through it.
Thanks for your attention and all the feedback, I hope you are enjoying the ride.
No recap of previous posts or shit like that. Let’s get to this week’s content!
Comic of the week
Links of the week
Learn how to optimize your brain’s natural cognitive processes to read code more easily, write code faster, and pick up new languages in much less time. This book will help you through the confusion you feel when faced with strange and complex code, and explain a codebase in ways that can make a new team member productive in days!
Election Monoids And “Equal” Votes
I care a lot about the best ways to run elections. I also care about mathematics, and algebra in particular. What happens when you mix the two? Let’s find out!
At the core of all of this are the storage node servers. They are simple key-value stores that persist object data to hard disks. The node servers only shards of the overall object data, with the control plane replicating said shards across many different nodes.
AWS has written a lot about their newly-written storage backend - ShardStore. It initially started with just 40k lines of Rust.
Under the hood, it’s a simple log-structured merge tree (LSM Tree) with shard data stored outside the tree to reduce write amplification.
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This article is an abstract of the book DDD Distilled written by Vaughn Vernon
How does a computer/calculator compute logarithms?
As I was learning how to script in Python, I began to get curious about how things worked under the hood of this programming language. Since Python is open source, I was able to look at its source code to see how different mathematical functions, particularly in its math and cmath modules, worked and how their code was structured. (…)
However, when it came to the basic complicated math functions, like the logarithm, trigonometric, and exponential functions, I found that the Python source code didn’t have them written up, because Python used the functions from the C library. This led me to a new adventure where I looked into the original C code, which, while more difficult to read, is surprisingly readable once you have learned Python.
What the F*%k is a moment arm and what does it have to do with my training!?
Notice how the person with long legs and a short torso has a longer moment arm between the bar and the knee and how the knees go past the toes? Imagine, if we were to give this lifter a more upright torso – the knees would be much farther past the toes in order for them to get their hips down further while driving their chest up
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Book of the week
Have a nice week. 😉
Have you read last week's post? Check the archive.