Hasnain says:

This is an interesting new development - it’s always great when people revisit some of the fundamentals. Not sure if this info will percolate elsewhere though...

“Dr. Parsonnet suspects inflammation caused by those and other persistent maladies explains the temperature documented by Wunderlich and that a population-level change in inflammation is the most plausible explanation for a decrease in temperature.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting “technical” read on project management and expectations from a senior engineer.

One thing I liked was that the author was not prescriptive - rather, just laying out an expectations framework. There is a link to a more detailed document as well as a prescriptive version for people doing this for the first time - I skimmed those and they seemed legit.

“I tried to put all of these as guidance: being clear on the expected output, but not specifying the “how”. Want to do this via Scrum? Fine. Adhoc? Also good. Some weird, new method? Go ahead. Having space for tech leads to experiment is so important for growing for leads”

Hasnain says:

This was a really good read on balancing the 'I want this code to be perfect' approach with a mindset around how code evolves over time - when is the right time to work on the best abstraction, versus leaving it open to evolution before we're sure we know the right approach?

"It was already late at night (I got carried away). I checked in my refactoring to master and went to bed, proud of how I untangled my colleague’s messy code.

The Next Morning
… did not go as expected.

My boss invited me for a one-on-one chat where they politely asked me to revert my change. I was aghast. The old code was a mess, and mine was clean!

I begrudginly complied, but it took me years to see they were right."

Hasnain says:

This is a pretty good read - side stepping the discussion around the async/await hype, this goes into some really fundamental concepts of distributed systems (flow control and back-pressure) and shows how almost everyone gets it wrong.

There are some tradeoffs in making this code easier to write and more accessible - you can set yourself up for a lot of future pain without the natural railings of "hey this is getting tough maybe I should ask for help" to help out.

"The lack of back pressure however is a type of footgun that has the size of a bazooka. If you realize too late that you built a monster it will be almost impossible to fix without major changes to the code base because you might have forgotten to make some functions async that should have been. And a different programming environment does not help here. The same issues people have in all programming environments including the latest additions like go and Rust."

Hasnain says:

This is from a while ago - lessons learnt from porting an embedded graphics library from C++ to Rust, a comparison of the performance you can get, but also a good discussion of developer productivity and cognitive load.

“This is an interesting test case for Rust, because we're very much in C/C++'s home court here: the demo runs on the bare metal, without an operating system, and is very sensitive to both CPU timing and memory usage.

The results so far? The Rust implementation is simpler, shorter (in lines of code), faster, and smaller (in bytes of Flash) than my heavily-optimized C++ version — and because it's almost entirely safe code, several types of bugs that I fought regularly, such as race conditions and dangling pointers, are now caught by the compiler.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really good human interest blog mixed with technical bits. A coming of age story from a college student to a dropout to working various jobs until becoming one of the most famous engineers in the JS community. Worth reading!

“I caught a cold. As the day of our would-be trip got closer, I felt worse, but I was hoping that maybe I’d be okay. When my train from Moscow to St. Petersburg had arrived, I clearly had a temperature. She said to come to her place anyway. She made me some hot tea, gave me warm socks, and we kissed. I moved in.”

Hasnain says:

This is horrifying and disappointing. A story of how dogma and groupthink - even without active malice - can lead to so much harm.

I had never heard about this before - and it’s quite sad to think of the “what-if”s in this situation.

“The brain, Alzheimer’s researchers patiently explain, is hard — harder than the heart, harder even than cancer. While that may be true, it is increasingly apparent that there is another, more disturbing reason for the tragic lack of progress: The most influential researchers have long believed so dogmatically in one theory of Alzheimer’s that they systematically thwarted alternative approaches. Several scientists described those who controlled the Alzheimer’s agenda as “a cabal.””

Hasnain says:

Not just a survey but a good analysis of name recognition across generations and how it affects polling.

The results reconfirm how bad I am putting faces to names - I recognized a lot of names but not the faces.

Kinda sad looking at how quick the drop in recognition percentages was to some of the more foreign names though.

"You answered 16 of 52 questions correctly, better than 5% of Times readers."

Hasnain says:

This was posted as a counter to an article earlier in the day advocating why one should quit a big company and work for a startup.

While I believe the decision is highly individual - I do agree with the author and folks at large that the market has gotten quite crazy - it’s downright impossible for startups to compete or get some of the skilled engineers they *need*

“To make the situation worse, the very good engineers, the ones who could truly help build a tech company from the ground up from day 1, were getting offers so exorbitant they could not possibly fathom to turn them down. And, to be clear, I’m not saying that one should or should not place money or perks above everything, but that from my experience, money and perks are such a strong driver for most people that it’s already activated an industry-wide transformation due to the expanding resources of big tech companies and the failure of startups to keep up with them.”

Hasnain says:

Such a good human interest story.

“In my opinion, the real snowflakes are the people who are afraid of that situation. The poor souls who never take the opportunity to discuss ideas in a group of people who will very likely respectfully disagree with them. I challenge any of you hyper-opinionated zealots out there to actually sit down with a group of people who disagree with you and be open to having your mind changed. I’m not talking about submitting your deeply held beliefs to your twitter/facebook/instagram feeds for agreement from those who “follow” you. That unreal “safe space” where the accountability for ones words is essentially null. I have sure had my mind changed here at Yale. To me there is no dishonor in being wrong and learning. There is dishonor in willful ignorance and there is dishonor in disrespect.”