Polymath Engineer Weekly #43
Let's learn something together
Hello again. Hope you have a nice week ;)
Links of the week
“But what do infinite learners actually do differently? And in the classic debate of almost every leadership characteristic, is it nurture or nature that primarily drives it? With almost every one of these debates, the answer certainly lies somewhere in between: some individuals have a stronger proclivity to the personality traits naturally held by infinite learners, while other aspects can be acquired with deliberate practice.“
Banco do Brasil extracts Open Banking investment data with Quarkus and Kafka
“But, to use one entire instance of the application to process one message at a time seems like a waste of resources. In the past our requirement was that each running pod should be able to process more than one message from the Kafka topic simultaneously. This challenge was the most exciting part of the project.
The team thought that we would need to do this programatically, receiving the messages from the Kafka consumer and creating threads manually. Then, we read the Quarkus Kafka guide and discovered that it was possible to do some tuning in the worker thread pool that consumes messages. The guide says that there is more information on the SmallRye Reactive Messaging documentation.“
What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
“What does it take to produce “meaningful human language”? In the past, we might have assumed it could be nothing short of a human brain. But now we know it can be done quite respectably by the neural net of ChatGPT. Still, maybe that’s as far as we can go, and there’ll be nothing simpler—or more human understandable—that will work. But my strong suspicion is that the success of ChatGPT implicitly reveals an important “scientific” fact: that there’s actually a lot more structure and simplicity to meaningful human language than we ever knew—and that in the end there may be even fairly simple rules that describe how such language can be put together.“
“Over two decades of climbing this lattice of powerful languages, I have come to understand a lesser-known corollary of the Blub paradox, coining it the Co-Blub paradox1. This is the observation that knowledge of lesser languages is actively harmful in the context of a more powerful language. The hoops you unwittingly jumped through in Blub due to lacking feature X are anti-patterns in the presence of feature X. This is obviously true when stated abstractly, but insidious when one is in the middle of it.“
“Slack improves a team's ability to respond to urgent requests. Often teams need to collaborate, such as extending an API for another team's feature. Without slack, such work needs to be scheduled into the plan, increasing delay, and the cycle time of other teams. Small tasks can be handled in slack, done quickly with little ceremony. Remember that high utilization increases latency.“
Equity 101 for Software Engineers at Big Tech and Startups
“This post attempts to summarize the most common equity compensation setups you might come across, help you understand their value, and point to additional resources. This is the information I wish I knew earlier to understand how equity works at the high-level, and help me do more detailed research when I got offers that contained equity components.“
Book of the Week
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
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.