South Software Content Suggestion #15
What I read and watch this week (Friday, November 1 2024)
We’re back this week with new content to enjoy! Here I review content I consumed in the last week, so you can decide whether to go for it or not.
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Books
A surprising gem. AWK is anything but a new language, yet this book still represents an excellence among the programming books. Imagine the setting: C is all the rage, Python, Ruby, Perl have not yet been invented. People need to do quick prototyping and text processing. And here AWK comes, a C-like scripting language that works extremely well for text and file processing. And this book, by some of the most impactful minds in computer science, explains how to write different types of software with it, including their own DB and a language interpreter.
Articles
A story about leaving a job at Apple, by many considered a dream job. Not always reality matches expectations, but some signals can be caught in advance.
Argument against Python in Education
I mostly don’t agree with what is written here, but being exposed to different ideas is the goal of this newsletter, isn’t it? Also, a good remainder that Python is not easy to learn, and practicing it correctly requires discipline and experience.
Some companies are having the “bright” idea of not hiring juniors anymore because GenAI can do their work. This is, at best, not looking over first-order consequences. Hiring only seniors may not be a shortcut at all.
“Seniority isn’t a particular space, it’s just a label for what the particular organization values. Many Senior engineers are products of the incentive structures of their orgs, and part of that is, unfortunately, calcified Opinions.”
What Silicon Valley "Gets" about Software Engineers that Traditional Companies Do Not
Many professionals, software or not, are intrigued by the Silicon Valley’s high salaries. But why can those companies pay much more than the rest of the world? It turns out they make more way more money, and they can probably do it because of the different way they work.
“The expectation from developers at traditional companies is to complete assigned work. At SV-like companies, it's to solve problems that the business has. This is a huge difference. It impacts the day-to-day life of any engineer.”
Let’s conclude with another story from an ex-employee. This is one of the few insights into Palantir, a controversial company in the Silicon Valley. I found it a very valuable insight, though I don’t agree with his philosophical stance.
"When we were allowed to work within an organization, this tended to work very well. The obstacles were mostly political. Every time you see the government give another $110 million contract to Deloitte for building a website that doesn’t work, or a healthcare.gov style debacle, or SFUSD spending $40 million to implement a payroll system that - again - doesn’t work, you are seeing politics beat substance. See SpaceX vs. NASA as another example."
Tweet
https://x.com/JSheltzer/status/1272574976454012930
Old, but a useful reminder about how visibility is important also in research. Too many papers to read and not enough time to read them all.
Podcasts
An incredible discussion about how to live a “deep” life, from someone that achieved the goal. And in the meanwhile shares useful suggestions and incredible stories, like when he “hacked” the media system by sharing that he was selling an improbably large number of copies of his soon-to-be first book.
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