Turning The Database Inside Out With Apache Samza

Based on a talk at Strange Loop 2014, this post was eye-opening. Although it’s supposed to be about Apache Samza, most of the talk is devoted to talking about databases in general and what they are good at: Keeping global state, replication, secondary indexing, caching, and materialized views. This high-level view provided me with a lot of new perspective of how to think of databases. The many illustrations in the article are beautiful. Please go and read.

Your Most Important Skill: Empathy

The legendary Chad Fowler makes the case that empathy is a skill that everyone will benefit from developing further. Provides great list of why that is. Most importantly, he also details how to practice.

Git From The Inside Out

Git has often been criticized for having an inconsistent interface and leaking unneeded abstractions to the user. Some of that criticism is warranted. Nonetheless, git is one of my favorite programs. I use it hundreds of times throughout the day, always on the command-line, complemented by tig, the ncurses client for git. This article talks about the internals of git: How it stores data on disk for commits, trees, objects, tags, branches, etc. It is well written, well organized and a pleasure to read. If you read this guide, it will make it easier for you to interact with git because you will understand it’s intrenals. However, I think you should read it because it shows how great functionality can be achieved with software with minimal dependencies and using only the local filesystem as a data store.