Assorted tech links #1
If you like this sort of content, you can find me over at @pndrej, where I write about things like this more frequently (that is, more than once a year).
I do quite a bit of reading and watching of tech talks and since I often forget things, I decided to turn this into a sort of bookmarking service.
- A good talk on the basics of open source contribution - what to do, how to get that first pull request submitted etc. Paul Ganssle is the maintainer of dateutil (its parser is superb) and a contributor to CPython.
- Service meshes (if that’s the correct plural) are all the rage these days. And here’s a nice talk by the author of Envoy, which is quickly becoming the goto service mesh out there (Google announced a hosted version recently). If you like podcasts, check out this episode of Software Engineering Daily, it’s about Linkerd.
- With all those cutting edge technologies, it’s quite refreshing to listen to a podcast about coding for the ZX Spectrum, specifically for an episode of Black Mirror (an excellent TV series, by the way).
- One of the most cited issues with pandas has been its inability to contain integer series with nulls. This lack of support is caused by the treatment of nulls in series - pandas uses sentinel values rather than a separate bitarray. Here is a good overview of what’s changed recently by Jeff Reback, pandas’ long time maintainer.
- Postgres is my goto database and even after more than 20 years of development, there are new features introduced every year. The latest version, 11, is mostly focused around better partitioning and parallelisation. I liked two videos on it - Magnus Hagander mostly focuses on features, while Joe Conway covers how development is done as well.