Curated Content December 2021
A few pieces of content I thought were worthwhile in the month of December.
Not as much curated content this month, despite feeling like I consumed quite a bit.
Articles
Shard Manager
An extremely interesting article from Facebook on some of the challenges with the adoption of sharding when developing an application, including difficulty maintaining availability during planned upgrades and the lack of support geodistribution and how they overcome these challenges using their shard management framework Shard Manager.
Books
Kill it with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems - Marianne Bellotti
Kill it with Fire is a great guide on how to handle legacy system updates from both a technical and, more critically, social perspective. Your legacy system can be less than a year old, or decades, and this one contains helpful tips to dig yourself out, and avoid falling back in the hole next time around.
Tweets
As a software developer, you may be called upon to perform some of these tasks in your career.
— Lorin Hochstein (@norootcause) December 27, 2021
How well a CS degree prepares you for these tasks (and whether it even should prepare you for these) is left as an exercise to the reader.
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An excellent thread walking through some of the on the job activities of software engineering, and the implications of the utility of a CS degree for them.