Issue #12: 10 Reads, A Handcrafted Weekly Newsletter for Humans

Hello All,

Here are 10 reads I thought were worth sharing this week. The total time to read this newsletter is 148 minutes. This week newsletter has stories on JOMO, How Netflix  works, Amazon RDS, Amazon Aurora, Deep work, and few more interesting topics.

Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect. — Greg McKeown

1. did.txt file: 5 mins read. This is a great idea. Create a did.txt file and write about what you did during the past mental sprint. I started documenting my learning in small posts under Today I learned category. But, I fail to do daily. This looks like a good option.
2. How to Make This the Summer of Missing Out: 10 mins read. JOMO, is not a misspelling of “mojo” but, rather, stands for “joy of missing out.” The antithesis of FOMO (fear of missing out), JOMO is about disconnecting, opting out and being O.K. just where you are.
3. Netflix: What Happens When You Press Play? : 30 mins read. If there is one article that you read this week it has to be this one. This article by Todd Hoff goes in detail on how Netflix deliver high quality content to its user.  Netflix has been a long time poster boy for AWS.  There are many interesting things covered in this post 1) why Netflix created their own CDN? 2) How Netflix uses ISPs to deliver content? 3) Netflix video transcoding pipeline 4) How they generate personalised header image for each user 5) Netflix finds AWS cheaper than their own datacenter. I read on Quora that Netflix monthly AWS bill is $23.6 million.
4. Stream changes from Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL using Amazon Kinesis Data Streams and AWS Lambda: 15 mins read.  This is an interesting post by AWS guys on how to stream changes from Amazon RDS PostgreSQL to Kinesis stream. Interestingly, I am also working on a similar problem where I need to stream changes from IBM DB2 instances to Kinesis. As IBM DB2 does not have such capability, we are polling the database periodically.
5. Elixir: A Mini-Documentary: 13 mins watch. This is a small documentary that share history of Elixir programming language. It would be great if we can have such documentaries for all programming languages.
6. In Praise of Deep Work, Full Disconnectivity and Deliberate Rest: 30 mins read. This is a long read on an essential topic for all of us — Deep Work. One of the best quotes from this essay for me is Make your peace with the fact that saying ‘no’ often requires trading popularity for respect.
7. Stop Trying To Change Yourself: 10 mins read. You can’t change yourself, so don’t even try. I know that’s not what the infomercials and self-help seminars tell you. But fuck it. They’re wrong. You can’t change. Like a thirsty man in a desert chasing a mirage, or a fat man peering into an empty fridge—there’s nothing there. So stop chasing it. Go do something else instead.
8. Seneca on The Shortness of Time: 5 mins read. If we see someone throwing money away, we call that person crazy. This bothers us, in part, because money has value. Wasting it seems nuts. And yet we see others—and ourselves—throw away something far more valuable every day: Time.
9. Public Cloud Services Comparison: 15 mins read. A chart comparing 6 public cloud vendors.
10. When Should I Use Amazon Aurora and When Should I use RDS MySQL? : 15 mins read. The post suggests 1) f you are looking for a native HA solution then you should use Aurora 2) For a read-intensive workload within an HA environment, Aurora is a perfect match. Combined with ProxySQL for RDS you can get a high flexibility 3) Aurora performance is great but is not as much as expected for write-intensive workloads when secondary indexes exist. In any case, you should benchmark both RDS MySQL and Aurora before taking the decision to migrate. Performance depends much on workload and schema design 4) By choosing Amazon Aurora you are fully dependent on Amazon for bug fixes or upgrades 5) If you need to use MySQL plugins you should use RDS MySQL 6) Aurora only supports InnoDB. If you need other engines i.e. MyISAM, RDS MySQL is the only option.