Links

This page is:

• an archive for me (I have a problem),
• a collection of “best I could find” links for others (Google isn’t that good), and
• a way to discover new things which you didn’t think to search for.

It’s inspired by this links page.

Software design

• Simple Made Easy. “Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicity’s virtues over easiness’, showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path.” I’ve watched this talk multiple times, and it really affected the way I write code.
• Dan Abramov: The WET Code base. A talk encouraging you to not abstract too much (ie, the opposite of DRY).
• The Law of Leaky Abstractions. An essay about the dangers of abstraction.
• Writing Portable Embedded Software. A practical guide.

Misc. thoughts on programming

• The Rails Doctrine. A post about what’s important to the Ruby on Rails community. I quite like minimalism and some amount of static typing, but this post is a really good read and gave me a better idea of “the other way of doing things”
• Things You Should Never Do, Part I
• The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code

Numerical computing

• Why IEEE floats have two zeros: +0 and -0
• Comparing three methods of computing standard deviation
• Data Structures - Sparse Matrices
• Improving performance with SIMD intrinsics in three use cases
• AVX2: Computing dot product of 512 float arrays

Strings

• How Python strings work. A relatively long post which explains a variety of string formats, and generally the entire history of string types.
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!). A similar history of unicode, written in 2003.

Python

• Python Typing: Resisting the Any type
• Python strings are immutable, but only sometimes

Unix

• The Unix Chainsaw - Gary Bernhardt

Programming comedy

• A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
• Wat - Gary Bernhardt (video)
• A tale of two libcs - Drew Devault

Startups

• David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08. “David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of the Ruby on Rails framework and Partner at 37Signals gives insight into creating a profitable startup company” (without VC funding)

Non-technical

• LinkedIn’s Alternate Universe
• Keep Your Identity Small
• Ads Don’t Work That Way
• Give it five minutes

Design

• Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle. Inspirational talk about designing tools that enable people to understand and create.
• Redesigning Github repository page

Science

• Flapping Wings And The Science Of How Bees Can Fly
• The history of wildfire modeling
• Sea Level: How Do We Measure Global Ocean Levels And Do Rising Oceans Change That Benchmark?

Math

• Terry Tao on maths notation

Tools

• All about Modelica. Modelica is a language for developing simulation models. It’s sort of similar to Simulink, but quite a bit more powerful. A related tool is HASH.
• One bash command to start the day 🌅
• Semantic Versioning Will Not Save You

Random

• How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%
• Beej’s Guide to Network Programming. Using Internet Sockets.

Other bloggers

Check out fraidycat for a tool to follow people. The video explains it very well.

• fasterthanli.me
• drewdevault.com
• notes.eatonphil.com
• travisdowns.github.io
• karpathy.github.io
• blog.codinghorror.com
• kristofferc.github.io

Salary negotiation

• Salary Negotiation: Make More Money, Be More Valued
• Ten Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer
• The Art of Salary Negotiation with Josh Doody