Polymath Engineer Weekly #63
Cool stuff ahead
Hello again.
Links of the week
Traffic 101: Packets Mostly Flow
Requests to Slack can be broadly classified into two categories: websocket and non-websocket. The services running in the edge regions are called Edge Services and are responsible for handling incoming requests. We will look at both these types in detail in later sections but first let’s look at how packets flow to our edge PoPs from a client’s perspective (without going into too much detail on how DNS resolution works).
My personal experience has been that very often these sort-of-experimental approaches, while solving some issues, tend to cause many more issues than is apparent at first. An experience I've had several times throughout my Haskell-writing days—both in personal and professional code—is that we'll start with a fancy envelope-pushing approach, see some early advantages, and then eventually tear it out once we discover that the disadvantages have grown large enough that the approach was a net drag on our productivity.
[…] This wasn't an isolated incident: I'd say that in three-quarters of the projects I worked on where we tried a “fancy types” approach, we ended up finding them not worth it. It's also not just me: the entire Simple Haskell movement4 is predicated on the idea that you get the most benefits out of the language by eschewing the fancier experimental features and sticking to minimal extensions.
Kierkegaard and Entrepreneurship
There is generally a set path in life for people to follow. Most choices are made for us, and someone can exist purely within the tracks that were manufactured for them by their parents, culture, and society. After we graduate and become adults we go to work and get plugged into the place that is deemed most fit for us and contribute our small part as cogs in the machine.
⏯ How The Most Useless Branch of Math Could Save Your Life
There is an entire branch of math simply devoted to knots – and it has changed the world.
How GitHub’s CTO Architects Engineering Teams That Scale
Despite all the data and analytics, most of leadership and creating successful products is art. And making the right call relies heavily on intuition. The more experience you have, the more times you’re going to be able to make the right decision, so trust your gut.
⏯ Why traditional Cacio e Pepe is so hard to perfectly execute
What is the best way to make Cacio e Pepe at home? Today, we answer that question by doing a deep dive into the food science behind two different methods.
Book of the Week
Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
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.