Issue #36: 10 Reads, A Handcrafted Weekly Newsletter For Software Developers

The time to read this newsletter is 200 minutes.

Religion is the opium of the masses – Karl Marx

1. A Technical Introduction to MemSQL: 20 mins read. MemSQL is s fast, commercial, ANSI SQL compliant, highly scalable HTAP database. HTAP databases are those that support both OLTP and OLAP workloads. It supports ACID transactions just like a regular relational database .It also supports document and geospatial data types. I have also written a quick post on MemSQL that you can read.

2. It’s later than you think: 20 mins read. We all regret working too hard in the end. Give it a read it is an awesome write up on a heart breaking story.

3. Modern applications at AWS: 10 mins read. To succeed in using application development to increase agility and innovation speed, organizations must adopt five elements, in any order: microservices; purpose-built databases; automated software release pipelines; a serverless operational model; and automated, continuous security.

4. 1 Year of Event Sourcing and CQRS: 30 mins read. This is a long read that covers DDD, CQRS, and Event Sourcing. In this post author covered how they implemented this architecture style and issues they faced.

5. The Single Most Important Internal Email in the History of Amazon: 20 mins read. This is a long read on how different organisations are organised. Some organisations are collocated and prefer synchronous mode of communication while others are distributed with asynchronous mode of communications. An organization’s communication system can be one of the most important leverages you can have to make an impact on productivity. Be very intentional about it.

6. Lessons from Design School for Software Engineers: 20 mins read. Great advice from an Engineer at Github. All the lessons resonated with me.

   1. You are not your audience
   2. Constructive, objective feedback is always better than reductive, subjective feedback
   3. You are not your designs/work
   4. Iteration is key for improvement
   5. Always critique your work
7. A Multithreaded Fork of Redis That’s 5X Faster Than Redis : 20 mins read. This is interesting. A fork of Redis that makes use of multi-threading to make Redis 5x faster. From the post:

   > KeyDB has a different philosophy on how the codebase should evolve. We feel that ease of use, high performance, and a “batteries included” approach is the best way to create a good user experience. While we have great respect for the Redis maintainers it is our opinion that the Redis approach focusses too much on simplicity of the code base at the expense of complexity for the user. This results in the need for external components and workarounds to solve common problems.

8. Why we decided to go for the Big Rewrite: 20 mins. This post goes into detail how channable did rewrite of their main data processing system. It has a lot of good advice that you can apply in your work as well.

9. How to Write Fast Code in Ruby on Rails: 15 mins read. This post contains general advice to write fast and performant Ruby code. Many of the lessons can be applied even if you use any other programming language.

10. Cascading Cache Invalidation: 25 mins read. This is an interesting article covering flaw in one of the best practice most people use for asset caching i.e content hashes in filenames and far-future expiry. Author also shared three possible solutions to the problem.

Video of the week

This week video: Intel and Rust: the Future of Systems Programming