Polymath Engineer Weekly #65
Links to brighten your day
Hello again.
Links of the week
ClickHouse Keeper: A ZooKeeper alternative written in C++
In this post, we describe the motivation, advantages, and development of ClickHouse Keeper and preview our next planned improvements. Moreover, we introduce a reusable benchmark suite, which allows us to simulate and benchmark typical ClickHouse Keeper usage patterns easily. Based on this, we present benchmark results highlighting that ClickHouse Keeper uses up to 46 times less memory than ZooKeeper for the same volume of data while maintaining performance close to ZooKeeper.
Many scholars have proposed that the struggle at midlife is about the fear that comes with our first true glimpse of mortality. Again, wishful thinking. Midlife is not about the fear of death. Midlife is death. Tearing down the walls that we spent our entire life building is death. Like it or not, at some point during midlife, you’re going down, and after that there are only two choices: staying down or enduring rebirth.
Once you hear the call to adventure, you have the choice of the pain of stagnation or the uncertainty of exploration. Both are impossibly daunting, but only one of them definitely ends in a literal or metaphorical death. At least that guiding intelligence can sometimes make the path a little clearer by giving you energy along the route.
Owning index funds has always been a winning strategy when it comes to outperforming professional investor for the simple fact that active investors are the market. When you net out their higher-than-index fund fees, they have to underperform, collectively.
Sure, some will outperform but the odds of you picking those active managers ahead of time are slim.
Career transitions & working identity / pt. 3
Society gives a lot of importance to new external changes. But neglected are the internal psychological states one must go through in order to successfully transition to a new situation. Pair that with the loss of traditions and rituals - rites of passage - that helped individuals let go of an old chapter in their lives and pave the way for a new one, and we have a society that is incapable of dealing with transitions in an integrated, holistic manner.
On productivity metrics and management consultants
If you want to institute a change to a software development organization, and you don’t have the political capital to support it, then building a metrics program that will justify your project is a pretty good strategy if you can pull that off: if you can define metrics that will support the outcome that you want, and you can get the metrics program in place, then you can use it as ammunition for the new plan. (“We’re spending too much time on toil, we should build out a system to automate X”).
Book of the Week
Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career
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.