October 2024
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
In April 2021, I wrote about the Productivity Step By Step (Produktywność Krok Po Kroku) course by Piotr Nabielec. This time, I completed the Productivity By Heart course, and I must say, it brought back the creativity spark I felt I had lost along the way. The course provided a fresh perspective on productivity and has been a game-changer for me. You can find my certification of completion here. I’ll be diving into more details about this course in a separate post after going through all the materials once again.
On another note, I've been enhancing my workflow in the terminal. I've added some new tools like:
fzf- a command-line fuzzy finderripgrep- a recursive line-oriented search toolfd- an alternative tofind
Articles
A short history of the O’Reilly animals
How lions, tigers, and tarsiers went geek.
Moving to the Netherlands for a Tech Job: The Ultimate Guide
To sum up, the Netherlands is a unique relocation destination that offers a very beneficial environment for IT specialists with a 30% tax ruling, excellent work-life balance, and outstanding standard of living.
High Growth Engineer: 5 Keys to the Hiring Manager Interview from a Meta Senior Manager
In his time at Meta, he’s conducted over 2,000 interviews and has seen every mistake in the book. He will share the biggest mistakes with you and what to do instead.
How to (and how not to) design REST APIs
Much of this may be "duh", but there might be a few rules you haven't considered yet.
A Life Engineered: A European Developer Journey In Big Tech
With so much focus on the US, there's a lot of opportunity in Europe-if you can find it.
What I'm Doing and How It's Going
How I went from a $350K FTE to $700K+ doing my own thing.
High Growth Engineer: 3 Career Principles that got me to Director at Google
What helped me get 5 promotions in 10 years at Google.
Allegro tech blog: Do repeat yourself! What is responsibility in code?
Did you know that in October this year, DRY principle will celebrate its 25th anniversary? It was proposed by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas in The Pragmatic Programmer book in 1999.
Unplanned Obsolescence: Less htmx is More
How should we use htmx?
Hacking Scale: How Uber Reduced Their Log Size By 99%
Uber broke apart an open source tool to massively compress their logs.
The Pragmatic Engineer: Why techies leave Big Tech
A job in Big Tech is a career goal for many software engineers and engineering managers. So what leads people to quit, after working so hard to land these roles?
Productivity
GYSHIDO
The Art Of Getting Your Shit Done
Habits of great software engineers
The true essence of a software developer's role combines many different skills, mindsets, and disciplines.
AI
Google NotebookLM
NotebookLM is your personalized AI research assistant powered by Google's most capable model, Gemini 1.5 Pro.
Gonçalo Valério: “Extracting wisdom” from conference videos
A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post about how I run these AI tools on my device without the need of leaking any data to external services. Today, I’ll describe how I used them to help me with the task of extracting the key information and learnings from all the videos I won’t be able to watch.
Gonçalo Valério: Local AI to the rescue
While understandable, given that the hardware requirements for AI stuff are massive, I find unsettling the continuation of the trend of all your data and interactions being shared with a remote company.
Prompt Engineering Guide
Motivated by the high interest in developing with LLMs, we have created this new prompt engineering guide that contains all the latest papers, advanced prompting techniques, learning guides, model-specific prompting guides, lectures, references, new LLM capabilities, and tools related to prompt engineering.
Security
Forbes: Google Will Track Your Location ‘Every 15 Minutes’—‘Even With GPS Disabled’
If you’re worried your phone might be spying on you, sharing your data and location without you realizing, then a new report this week will make alarming reading.
CloudImposer: Executing Code on Millions of Google Servers with a Single Malicious Package
Tenable Research discovered a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) that is now fixed and that we dubbed CloudImposer. The vulnerability could have allowed an attacker to hijack an internal software dependency that Google pre-installs on each Google Cloud Composer pipeline-orchestration tool. Tenable Research also found risky guidance in GCP documentation that customers should be aware of.
Python
Miguel Grinberg: The Ultimate Guide to Error Handling in Python
Exceptions in Python is one of those areas that have a surface layer that most people know, and a deeper, almost secret one that a lot of developers don't even know exists.
Django
Simon Willison’s TILs: Building an automatically updating live blog in Django
OpenAI's DevDay event yesterday (October 1st 2024) didn’t invite press (as far as I can tell), didn’t livestream the event and didn’t allow audience livestreaming either. I made a last minute decision to live blog the event myself.
Python libraries
openai/swarm
Educational framework exploring ergonomic, lightweight multi-agent orchestration. Managed by OpenAI Solution team.
Tools
rwblickhan: Command Line Tools I Like (2022)
That said, I like a number of modern command line tools, many written in Rust, which are typically blazing fast and have better command-line interfaces than traditional Unix tools.
sharkdp/fd
A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to 'find'
Other stuff
International Tech Job Search Handbook
All-in-one guide to getting a tech job abroad 🌎
The Black Dog: Live Coding Software For Music
In September 2024 we took part in a Live Coding Workshop and Showcase at the Festival of the Mind 2024 in Sheffield. Together with the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield, we spent the afternoon making bleeps with code, before heading out for a live demo at the Spiegeltent in the city centre.
Videos
Django Day Copenhagen 2024
The full Django Day Copenhagen 2024 playlist.
EuroPython 2024
The full EuroPython 2024 playlist
TED: Ted Ferries - Why you should define your fears instead of your goals
The hard choices -- what we most fear doing, asking, saying -- are very often exactly what we need to do. How can we overcome self-paralysis and take action? Tim Ferriss encourages us to fully envision and write down our fears in detail, in a simple but powerful exercise he calls "fear-setting." Learn more about how this practice can help you thrive in high-stress environments and separate what you can control from what you cannot.