Polymath Engineer Weekly #38
Are you curious?
Hello again. Enjoy the reads ;)
Links of the week
Reverse Engineering A Mysterious UDP Stream in My Hotel
“I have been staying at a hotel for a while. It’s one of those modern ones with smart TVs and other connected goodies. I got curious and opened Wireshark, as any tinkerer would do.
I was very surprised to see a huge amount of UDP traffic on port 2046. I looked it up but the results were far from useful. This wasn’t a standard port, so I would have to figure it out manually.“
The Four Horsemen of the Tech Recession
“It really was jarring to see those employment figures the same week that tech company after tech company reported mostly disappointing earnings, and worse forecasts, all on the heels of layoffs. Even Meta, which saw a massive uptick in its stock, reported revenue that was down 4% year-over year; the stock increase was a special case where too many investors bought into Meta Myths that convinced them a company with a still strong and growing core business was somehow doomed.“
4 secrets for hiring and retaining technical women
“The desire to tangibly amplify diversity in the tech sector is a challenge that most organizations struggle with. The first step in understanding how to address the challenge is understanding the breadth of the issue and the supporting data. One of the best sources of data comes from the report, Women in the Workplace.“
An Expertise Acceleration Experiment in Judo
“The point I’m making is this: as working adults, we don’t naturally work in environments where deliberate practice is possible. Many skill domains that we are interested in don’t come with coaches, nor established training programs. My favourite example is the following: suppose you want to get better at office politics. Being political is a skill; some people have better political instincts than others; anyone who has worked for any amount of time would know that certain people may accomplish things in certain organisational contexts that others, who are perhaps equally technically skilled, cannot“
The difference between good and great engineers
“The default path for startups is towards failure. A team that thinks it’s going to lose, will lose. Positivity is infectious, and brings the best out in people. A team that has belief and is constantly creative in its efforts to succeed has a chance.
Be that engineering team – hire those exceptional people to be your great engineers.“
John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++
“Not everything can be pure; unless the program is only operating on its own source code, at some point you need to interact with the outside world. It can be fun in a puzzly sort of way to try to push purity to great lengths, but the pragmatic break point acknowledges that side effects are necessary at some point, and manages them effectively.“
Book of the Week
Do you have any more links our community should read? Feel free to post them on the comments.
Have a nice week. 😉
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