Joy & Curiosity #15

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Yesterday I took the train to Munich and gave a talk at Homebrew Systems Club, titled Writing Tucan. I talked about Tucan, the optimizing compiler I built from 2020 to 2023 and that's now sitting in my vault, waiting for what I do with it. (If you’re interested, you can find the slides here.)

Now I’m sitting on the train again, this time going back home, and keep thinking: what a lovely day it was! Interesting conversations with interesting people, proper Bavarian dinner, a few beers to end the evening with — what more can you really ask for?

• When I was a teenager, the grown-ups warned us that everything on the Internet is permanent — what you put on there, will be there forever. Nowadays we all know that’s not true. Linkrot, bitrot, Google shutting down products — the Internet is anything but “permanent.” That makes it all the more lovely when you can genuinenly peek into the Internet’s past, as in this post: IMG_0416. “During the Send to YouTube era of 2009 and 2012, the title of one’s YouTube video was defaulted to this naming convention. Unwitting content creators would then upload their videos on a public site with a barely-searchable name. To this day, there are millions of these videos.”

• Now this post, this is it: How I ship projects at big tech companies. Commenters were furious about it — “this is all bullshit” — but I think the article is spot-on and it contains more than just a truth about working at larger companies.

• Leaving and waving — beautiful and sad.

• I read Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It this week and fell in love with his writing. Immediately, on the first page. Then, a couple days later, I came across this New Yorker piece on Norman Maclean, which was also fantastic. "One of those questions is practical, a matter of craft: How does he do this? But another is ontological: What kind of man could make this work?" Highly recommend the book (the title-giving story is only ~120 pages or so) and this article — nice pairing.

• Oz wrote something really interesting: “I generally prefer not to comment on software development practices, because of something I’ve observed often enough that it feels like a law: for every excellent engineer who swears by a particular practice, there’s an even better one who swears by the opposite.” Imagine we all shared this preference.

• “And by the time they get to university and by the time they’ve done an undergraduate degree, they’ve learned to become proficient. I mean, those that pass through the sieve and eventually get to become physicists or something, they have all learned how to do the same thing in the same way. And that’s going to put a damper on doing things a different way, a new way.”

• As real as it gets: How We Built a Self-Healing System to Survive a Terrifying Concurrency Bug At Netflix. “This was an inflection point at which many other places I’ve worked would have psychologically collapsed under the weight of their own worldview. […] I’ll say this about Netflix – during my time there, I always found it to be an extremely practical place.”