Polymath Engineer Weekly #96
Staying Current, CPU Utilization, Option Trading, Gameboy, Brain, Clocks and People Skills
Hello again.
Comic of the week
Links of the week
A common lament among software developers is that the pace of technology is so overwhelming that they can't keep up. This is true. You can't keep up.
There will always be something that you don't know. In fact, most things you don't know. This isn't a condition isolated only to technology. The sum total of all human knowledge is so vast that you can't know it all. What you will learn, even after a lifetime of diligent study, will be a nanoscopic fraction of all human knowledge - even of everything related to software development. You can't stay current. Get used to it.
A more appropriate question is: How do I keep my skill set relevant?
The Art of System Debugging — Decoding CPU Utilization
It is the API Gateway for Flipkart which calls a myriad of microservices using the scatter gather pattern. It uses circuit breaking to avoid thundering herd issues on upstream dependencies. All frontend clients like the Desktop, Mobile Site, Android and iOS apps consume this API to render the interfaces. For the sake of this blog post, let’s call this application the APIGateway application.
Unemployed Guy Explains Option Trading in 5 Levels of Complexity
My name is Ben, I'm an unemployed option trader and youtube finance professional with 0 certification, training, or formal education.
The Insane Engineering of the Gameboy
It’s awesome to see how hard constraints can foster very creative solutions.
Mapping the Human Brain and Where This May Lead Us
The idea is that in order to understand the brain, we must understand the network and not merely the individual neurons or functioning of individual synapses. This is similar to how our understanding of a genome relies on observing how DNA is transcribed into functional building blocks; components which ultimately result in anything from as simple as a single-celled eukaryote, to a functioning human body, or any other lifeform. By observing the way the genome is used in this context, we gain understanding of how both the genome and the cell or body it’s part of fit together.
Test clocks: How we made it easier to test Stripe Billing integrations
Billing integrations are also difficult to test. Historically, the only way to run a test was to wait for time to pass—typically by creating test configurations with shorter subscription cycles than real production systems, or running 10-second trials to force subscriptions to cycle—and then look for any bugs that might surface in the course of normal business. Of course, doing anything that is not a perfect mirror of your production system is a shaky foundation to build on.
I have created a survey to get feedback from you. It takes only 2 minutes.
Book of the week
How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen
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.