Thursday, July 26, 2018

[Links of the Day] 26/07/2018 : CEO book, Middle Income Trap, Brexit and the future of European Geopolitics

  • The Great CEO Within : a good read on what it means to be a CEO and build up a company from scratch. It provides some good advice and hint of the challenges that not often talked about. 
  • Convergence vs. The Middle Income Trap: The Case of Global Soccer : a really good paper and eye-opening on the middle-income trap that nation can fall into the middle-income trap. The authors argue that the transfer of technologies, skills and best practices fosters this catch-up process. But there are limits and by analysing the soccer team progress over their history they demonstrate that like their economy these nations hit a plateau.  
  • Global Britain and the future of European Geopolitics: how Brexit is affecting the geopolitical landscape in Europe and it's relationship with the rest of the world (and especially Russia)


Tuesday, July 24, 2018

[Links of the Day] 24/07/2018 : Physics of baking a good pizza, Stagnation of incomes despite Economic growth, Asciinema

  • The Physics of baking good Pizza : when physicist tries to bake good pizza they write a paper about it. 
  • Stagnating median incomes despite economic growth : a look at the reason behind income stagnation despite an almost continuous economic growth for the past 20+ years. One of the worrying aspects is that it points out to an increase in wealth inequality which can lead to social unrest. Another interesting aspect is that the USA is a clear outlier as the wage growth was significantly lower than in OECD countries. This could provide a hint as to why this country is currently in such turmoil as the inequality gap has widened exponentially over the past couple of years. 
  • asciinema : record your terminal session and replay it .... the right way you can even convert your cast to GIF with asciicast2gif !


Thursday, July 19, 2018

[Links of the Day] 19/07/2018 : High perf distributed data storage, Economics of Landmines and ARPA model

  • Crail : high-performance distributed data store designed for fast sharing of ephemeral data in distributed data processing workloads
  • The economics of landmines : economic paper on the effects of post-war landmine contamination and the influence on the population and economic society as they slowly get cleared up. I would guess that to some extent the same models and impact could be applied to toxic waste contamination area. 
  • ARPA Model : how the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) model works and how it has evolved since its inception in 1958. The authors also look at the challenge the agency is facing in the years to come.

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

[Links of the Day] 17/07/2018 : Terraform collaboration tool, Cloud cost optimization, Oldschool NYC union negotiation

  • Atlantis : extremely useful framework for managing terraform script that is shared and used within a team and across teams. It streamlines your whole operation by deploying terraform on pull request merge. Making the whole operations integration seamless with your CI/CD. 
  • Cloud Cost Optimization  : Article expanding on Adrian Cockroft paper [ACM paper, Slide deck ] . It gives a good overview of the best practice out there for managing cloud cost and also skims on the many pitfalls of cost optimization. Like software development and the premature optimization fallacy, a lot of cloud customer spend way too much time trying to optimize cost early on with little to no effect. A good and quick read that can help you get in the right mindset when you need to set up a doctrine for controlling and improving your cloud cost management. 
  • Old School NYC Union negotiation : Wowww this video could have been straight out of a Scorcese mafia movie. But no, this is real life negotiation of NYC union... Which seems to goes like this: rambling ... Somebody talk loud and make a point while pointing finger.... Back to everybody arguing and ambient rambling. 



Thursday, July 12, 2018

[Links of the Day] 12/07/2018 : MIT Career Handbook , Visual Introduction to Machine learning, Mysql HA @ github

  • MIT Career Development Handbook : Really well-made handbook on career development by MIT. 
  • Visual Introduction to Machine Learning : this is a really intuitive introduction to machine learning with great visual. Making the whole process a breeze to understand the underpinning principles of machine learning. 
  • Github Mysql HA : How GitHub make it's Mysql highly available. There are many alternatives out there such as Galera. But Github decided to go its own way. My guess is that their scale requires specific characteristics that Galera and Al. can't deliver.



Tuesday, July 10, 2018

[Links of the Day] 10/07/2018 : Exploring the ARPA model, Standalone Dockerfile and OCI image builder, Log based Transactional graph engine


  • ARPA Model : why it has been good and still is to some extent. Interesting paper to read. 
  • img : Standalone, daemon-less, unprivileged Dockerfile and OCI compatible container image builder. If you want to safely build docker image in k8s or other environment but don't want a full docker setup. This is the tool for you. [blog]
  • LemonGraph : Log-based transactional graph engine by NSA. Graph DBs are slowly percolating through the industry as a valuable tool to map connection between entities. And it's not surprising that Intelligence agency uses them. 



Thursday, July 05, 2018

[Links of the Day] 05/07/2018 : Architecture of Open Source applications, Awesome CI , Searching for secrets in Git history

  • Architecture of Open Source Applications : this is a fantastic set of books that go over the architecture of open sources application. From how programmers solve interesting problems in 500 lines of code (or less) to performance and architecture of open source project.
  • Awesome-ci : awesome list of CI related articles, paper and tools. 
  • gitleaks : a useful tool that searches your git repo history for secrets and keys.. Sanitize all the things !



Tuesday, July 03, 2018

[Links of the day] 03/07/2018 : Information Theory introduction, Deep Reinforcement learning doesn't work (yet), Rust based Unikernel


  • A Mini-Introduction To Information Theory : a Cool introduction to the concept. Nice and succinct. 
  • Deep Reinforcement Learning Doesn't Work Yet : There is a lot of buzzes around using machine learning for health care. In the UK the prime minister just announced a massive program to leverage AI to help the NHS tackle cancer and other ailments. However, as this paper suggest. We are a very long way from having a practical solution. And I feel that there is a little bit too much hype and with that fund diverted from solutions that will actually benefit the overstretched health care system now. I do not say that ML will not work, just that there is better spending than throwing IT stuff at it.
  • A Rust-based Unikernel : love unikernel tech .. and now we have a nice Rust