The Fremen – What our team is reading

If you want to know how to work with new or limited resources, find a population that’s used to not having many alternatives. Find someone who has already optimized for the reality you’re about to enter and learn from them.

• [JS] The Fremen are the (possibly) fictional natives of the desert planet of Arrakis, who live with very little water.

[ET] I love how Julia Evans explains basic (and sometimes advanced) CS concepts. This week she made a flashcard game to test your SQL knowledge :)

You need to know this technique if you intend to write code for memory-constrained embedded systems, or operating-system kernels. It is useful if you are working with application data sets so large that your programs routinely hit memory limits. It is good to know in any application where you really, really care about optimizing your use of memory bandwidth and minimizing cache-line misses.

• [RO] The Lost Art of Structure Packing

[ET] Logic programming beyond Prolog: and introduction to boolean satisfiability solvers through nice examples. “Part of the reason why tools like Alloy exist is to help facilitate using SAT solvers for system design. When turning a program or architecture into a specification it is useful to think about things in terms of state change, rather than steps in an algorithm. “

[RO] Things I Wished More Developers Knew About Databases

Generating music at the audio level is challenging since the sequences are very long. A typical 4-minute song at CD quality (44 kHz, 16-bit) has over 10 million timesteps.

• [TS] via

A person’s success in life is determined by having a high minimum, not a high maximum. If you can do something really well but there are other things at which you’re failing, the latter will hold you back. But if almost everything you do is up there, then you’ve got a good life. And so I try to learn how to get through things that others find unpleasant.

• [GS] Donald Knuth - The computer scientist who can’t stop telling stories

Future users of large data banks must be protected from having to know how the data is organized in the machine (the internal representation)

• [JS] E. F. CODD, IBM Research Laboratory, San Jose, California - 1970 This quote is from the paper that is the seed of relational databases.

Have a good and inspiring weekend.