Curated Content August 2021
A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of August.
August was a slower month for curated content, but here are the picks.
Articles
Two Elements of Pair Programming Skill
Covers different patterns and anti-patterns that make for good pair programming sessions. The don't list includes ones we've all witnessed or been part of, like Drowning the Partner.
Books
No non-fiction recommendations for the month of August, but in the realm of fiction I thoroughly enjoyed Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. A fun read continuing the Locked Tomb Series.
Conference Talks
No conference talks this month.
Podcasts
Cal Newport on an Industrial Revolution for Office Work
![](https://80000hours.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/email-spam-overload-01.jpeg)
An excellent discussion from Cal Newport touching on many of the highlights of his new book A World Without Email, about how we've largely screwed up knowledge work as a society by letting it take place in an ad-hoc way, rather than optimizing it as a coherent process of work.
Tweets
a microservice is what you call it when, three years in, the original monolith programmer is tired of dealing with their own legacy code, tired of code review, and begins a greenfield project to recapture the feeling of working on their own once morehttps://t.co/M3xodVuYAe
— tef (@tef_ebooks) August 6, 2021
A tongue-in-cheek thread about microservices.
A mental model I have:
— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) August 25, 2021
The industry is so bad at evaluating early career engineers, and there are such great variances in performance, that it has a model which looks a bit like tenure track faculty, where a secondary sort happens post-employment.
If one fails it, managed out.
A discussion from @patio11 on how we fail as an industry at evaluating and nuturing talent, and how that plays out in compensation.