Monthlog 09: July 2020

• August 02, 2020
• 806 words
• 5 min

This is the 09 installment in my 'Monthlog' - a public list of blog posts, announcements, videos, podcasts, software, and libraries that catch my attention each month. I hope that regular readers will skim through the listings and find one, or multiple, things that pique their interest.

Note: Posts are not ordered in any particular way. If you find an article you think I might like, send it to me via one of the channels on my homepage.

Read

• Ringbahn II: the central state machine - Ringbahn is 'a safe API for using io-uring from Rust'. This is a great article documenting how Ringbahn's lowest level type, the 'Ring', is implemented. A great read about interactions between low-level Rust and the Linux Kernel.

• A Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day at Slack - Slack's post-mortem following a service outage on May 12, 2020. Gives a great behind the scenes look at how Slack is engineered on the server-side and how engineers went about diagnosing and resolving an issue in production. Discussion on HN

• I Need A Budget - This article is probably only relevant to a very niche audience. It covers implementing a budgeting system in the plain text accounting tool, Ledger. If you're generally interested in personal finance or budgeting, you might also find this article relevant.

• Jesse Duffield: Beginners Guide to Abstraction - A look at how to properly abstract as a software developer. Jesse is the developer of some popular open-source command-line utilities such as Lazy Git.

• Choosing a Rust web framework, 2020 edition - Rust web frameworks are developing very quickly, and there's been a lot of change over the past year. This article does a great job summarising the differences between the popular frameworks, assessing design decisions, community adoption, and documentation. Discussion on r/rust

• Ameya Shenoy: Wireguard on Kubernetes with Ad Blocking - Setting up a VPN using Wireguard and ad-blocking on top of Kubernetes. This is a good introduction to both Wireguard and the current state of Kubernetes. Discussion on HN

• Andrew Healey: Creating Randomness Without Math.random - I'm not familiar with random number generation but enjoyed this post as it introduced me to a new concept and Computer Science area.

• Carlos Galdino: Writing a File System from scratch in Rust - I'm continuing to look at file systems, and learning Rust. This article looks at both. Discussion on HN. Discussion on r/rust

Discuss

• Ask HN: What are some good resources to learn business administration/finance? - I'm always interested to learn more about business and finance. There are some great recommendations here that mesh the worlds of software, startups, and business administration.

• r/btrfs: Benchmark of BTRFS decompression - More file system stuff. Interestingly, these benchmarks show a sweet spot for read speeds at certain compression ratios. At some ratios, in this case zstd:11, reads are faster than at higher and lower ratios. This is due to the balance between read speed off of disks and the speed at which the data can be decompressed.

Recommended Sources to Follow

Below are a few media sources and voices I follow.

Blogs

• Matthias Endler: Rust developer and host of 'Hello, Rust!'
• Paul Graham: Member of YC, offers insightful well-written posts about business and software.
• Victor Zhou: Recent Princeton CS Graduate publishing informative guides with some focus on Machine Learning.
• Francesc Campoy: Gopher and JustForFunc host.
• Deterministic.Space - Pascal Hertleif's blog (g/KillerCup): Mostly Rust stuff.

Newsletters

• This Week In Rust - Rust news every week.
• EthHub Weekly - Weekly Ethereum updates, a quick paragraph summarising each headline.

Podcasts

• The Changelog: 'Conversations with the hackers, leaders, and innovators of software development.'
• Software Engineering Daily: Daily conversations covering anything Software Development related.
• Linux Unplugged: A Jupiter Broadcasting show. Relaxed, focused on Linux but touches on all things Unix and Open Source.
• Invest Like the Best: Finance and investing podcast often featuring Crypto.
• Y Combinator: Conversations with Y Combinator founders.
• Into the Ether: 'Focusing on all things Ethereum, the leading blockchain for decentralized applications.'