RC W3D5 - Reflecting on experience

Go

I've been spending the week on reading and writing code. I needed a breather, and made it a touch lighter today with blog posts and Youtube videos.

I found this post by Discord describing how they moved one of their services from Go to Rust. The engineering team discovered latency spikes from garbage collection, how performance issues persisted after tuning, and then decided to make the switch. Jon Gjengset in this video described how in Go, "even though concurrency is very easy, that concurrency is very easy to shoot yourself in the foot with".

Rust

I'm a believer that there's a tool for every trade, and keen to develop the sense where one would choose one tool vs another. I didn't pick this up in my earlier readings, but found out that creating a doubly-linked list in Rust is non-trivial.

Content: Farouk al-Kasim

I re-read my favourite articles before sharing them on here, some really do make me pause to reflect. This is a story of Farouk al-Kasim, who left Iraq months before the Ba'ath party took power and then prevented Norway from squandering its new-found oil wealth (enclosed below).

Content: Tango pour Claude

I remember hearing this and being very, very happy I asked for the name of the piece.

Content: BBoy Cloud

A little random I know, but why not when you have this much style.

Content: Siddharta

Re: self-reflection, I have to include Hermann Hesse's Siddharta. I love how the book highlights the importance of experience. It's tricky choosing just a single quote, but this one ties in well with being at RC to learn (or perhaps, learning through the experience of what works and what doesn't).

Has any samana or any Brahmin ever feared that someone might come and grab him and rob him of his learning and his piety and his profundity? No, for they are his own, and he gives of them only what he wishes to give and to whom he wishes to give. It is the same, exactly the same, with Kamala, and with the joys of love. Red and beautiful are Kamala’s lips, but try to kiss them against Kamala’s will, and you will not get a drop of sweetness from the lips that know how to give so much sweetness! You learn easily, Siddhartha, then learn this too: One can get love by begging, by buying, by receiving it as a gift, by finding it in the street, but one cannot steal it.