Polymath Engineer Weekly #19

A little late is better than never

Aug 11, 2022

Links of the week

You’re probably not a good leader (because being that is hard)

“Leadership is difficult because human nature is complex. Humans are capable of simultaneously admiring and despising people who have a higher status, more money or better prospects than them. This makes the job of a leader tricky because she has to focus on the quality of work and get the job done, despite who did it (an admirer or a hater).“

Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google.

“The primary purpose of the web today is “engagement,” which is Silicon Valley jargon for “how many ads can we push through someone’s optical nerve?”“

Implementing Stripe-like Idempotency Keys in Postgres

“In APIs idempotency is a powerful concept. An idempotent endpoint is one that can be called any number of times while guaranteeing that the side effects will occur only once. In a messy world where clients and servers that may occasionally crash or have their connections drop partway through a request, it’s a huge help in making systems more robust to failure.“

Demonstrate Danger, Safely

“This made me think of all the dangerous things I’ve done, but moreover about all the intensely simple precautions you can to render them non-risky, and I think that’s extremely important to talk about. Tops of my list are the aforementioned industrial robot arm and high powered lasers.“

Non-fungible token (NFT) and the ERC-721 standard

“Correspondingly, a non-fungible token contract (NFT contract) is essentially a smart contract that maintains a data structure to document ownership in a specific item, modeled as a mapping from item IDs (the so-called token ID) to the current owner.“

Data Race Patterns in Go

“In this blog, we will show various data race patterns we found in our Go programs. This study was conducted by analyzing over 1,100 data races fixed by 210 unique developers over a six-month period. Overall, we noticed that Go makes it easier to introduce data races, due to certain language design choices.“

Book of the week

Penetration Testing: A Hands-On Introduction to Hacking

Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.

Have a nice week. 😉

Have you read last week's post? Check the archive.