Hasnain says:

In this article the author talks about personal experiences mentoring teenagers, and how the modern society (and technology) are contributing to an extremely high stress daily environment for these kids.

It starts with a bang, mentioning technological innovations (which I hadn't heard about) like apps sending push notifications about new assignments and past test results, so kids are unable to disconnect and are always worrying about school.

The article talks about the parallels between this and working lives for adults (specifically the current millennial generation); with an aside into the constant pressure to be set up for the best education, then the best career - while they are already hearing from millennials that there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

Choice quote: "We owe it to the kids in our country to at least diagnose their disease, which is a society that turns children into stressed, anxious, competitive, indebted consumers. We do this to prepare them for their grown-up lives in a society that turns all people into stressed, anxious, competitive, indebted consumers."

Hasnain says:

The speaker covers some of the novel material behind Noria, a fast, concurrent database which uses materialized views to handle performance.

The slides available here do not talk about the systems research (left for the paper); rather they go into Rust and an implementation of a neat little crate called `evmap` which uses a pair of hashmaps and some pointer swizzling to achieve fast, concurrent read/write access to a shared structure in memory.

While I've seen similar approaches before in code, this is the best explanation I've found of this technique and it stuck - all from just the slides.

Hasnain says:

This was a good perspective on engineering leadership and people management.

The author talks about a bunch of things, including the transition(s) from senior engineer -> tech lead -> manager; the pitfalls of being a tech lead + line manager; avoiding bit-rot as a pure manager, and making the transition from line manager to manager of managers (and beyond).

The novel perspective I've seen here that is rare from most other articles/sources is that it talks a lot about the downsides/negatives of being a manager, which are often left unsaid.

The article is not all negative, though - it gives a lot of useful advice on how to improve one's management skills.

Choice quotes below.

On becoming a manager:

"Hopefully you have already gathered that management is a career change, not a promotion, and you’re aware that nobody is very good at it when they first start."

On becoming a manager of managers:

"Sure, there are compensating rewards. Money, power, impact. But I’m pointing out the negatives because most people don’t stop to consider them when they start saying they want to try managing managers. As almost every manager says after becoming a manager.

As though the mere existence of a ladder compels us all to climb."

Hasnain says:

This was a refreshing take on monorepos. Most arguments for/against them keep on the technical side, talking about how the repo gets large and slow (bad!) or the benefits of being able to make codebase wide changes in an atomic setting (good!), and debate the usefulness/commonality of each.

This instead focuses on the organizational cost, and how monorepos force you to make certain decisions/costs explicit, like the cost of maintaining separate branches/forks of internal code, and of having to coordinate releases of older code.

This is critical for larger organizations where it's very easy to sweep these costs under a rug unless there is a forcing function.

Worth a read.

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting read. The author goes into problems AI is solving, bias issues with AI, and the case that we should scale back our investments in AI, and push a lot more resources towards thinking bigger: rethinking how societal structures are set up in the first place.

While I disagree with the premise (there are enough researchers and resources to do both!); the point in the middle about AI (and, if I stretch the argument, the Valley) mostly focusing on problems with a more singular viewpoint, divorced from problems faced by a large portion of the world, rings true to me.

Paraphrasing what a friend once said, Silicon Valley engineers create problems for themselves and then make startups to solve those problems, without ever venturing outside that bubble.

Hasnain says:

App Store monopolies are real and showing

Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2018-12-31T08:57:54+0000

Hasnain says:

This was a long and interesting perspective on why college has gotten so expensive.

I look forward to the rebuttals to see what the author missed

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking this for future reading

Hasnain has not yet written a summary for this.
Posted on 2018-12-30T23:11:55+0000