February 2021

I am aggregating here some more or less interesting stuff of various IT related materials which I came across this month. Some of them are strictly related to the things I did or am currently doing.

Some thoughts

The biggest event of the month is fact that I stared a new job at Snowflake.

The second highlight of the months is that the Apache Beam provider for Apache Airflow on which I was working for several weeks was finally merged into master. Available on pypi:

Articles

Living with less. Everything I own now fits into a single carry-on bag

I don’t own a lot. A grand total of 116 items, to be precise.

All first drafts are bad drafts (and that’s what makes them good)

All first drafts of anything are bad drafts. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing – the first version of it probably won’t be very good.

Write Like You Talk

Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language.

How To Stop Feeling Productivity Shame

5 strategies to end the cycle of "never enough"

How to Write For the Way Your Coworkers Actually Read

Steal these data-backed marketing tricks of the trade to improve your memos, emails, messages, and more.

How to Organize Your Life

10 principles for organizing your work, home, health, fitness, hobbies, finances, and more...

Short Fat Engineers Are Undervalued

Professionals supposedly come in two shapes: either short and fat, or tall and skinny, meaning their skill set is either broad or deep. They can also be T-shaped—knowing a lot about a little and a little about a lot—but in this metaphor, that’s a compromise. After all, even a T need not have a 1:1 aspect ratio.

The pros and cons of being a software engineer at a BIG tech company

There are benefits to being a technical lead at a less software intensive business.

5 reasons why I love coding on Linux

Linux is a great platform for programming—it's logical, easy to see the source code, and very efficient.

How to Create a Permanent Work-From-Home Office

Thinking of setting up a permanent home office for productivity? Here are the home office ideas for creating and designing your work-from-home environment when working from home is long-term.

Git is my buddy: Effective Git as a solo developer

But what if I told you that Git can be a valuable tool without ever setting up a remote repository? Used correctly, Git can help to structure your work, identifying gaps in your test coverage and minimizing dead code.

Git Submodules: Adding, Using, Removing, Updating

I’ll cover two of the more difficult things to figure out: removing and updating submodules from your repository.

How to be more productive without forcing yourself

Imagine you could work more and be wildly productive. And the best thing about it? You wouldn’t need to force yourself to work.

Reasons why SELECT * is bad for SQL performance

Here’s a list of reasons why SELECT * is bad for SQL performance, assuming that your application doesn’t actually need all the columns.

Zsh Tricks to Blow your Mind

Read on to learn more about Zsh and some tips and tricks to optimize your development.

Python

Homebrew Python Is Not For You

Don’t use Homebrew Python. It’s not meant for you.

Building Rich terminal dashboards

Rich has become a popular (20K stars on GH) way of beautifying CLIs, and I'm pleased to see a number of projects using it. Since Rich is mature and battle-tested now, I had considered winding-down development. Until, I saw this tweet: The Tweet Do you want to see something […]

Why you really need to upgrade pip

If you’re using an old version of pip, installing the latest version of a Python package might fail—or install in a slower, more complex way. Learn what the problem is exactly, how to solve it, and what causes it.