Weekly picks. Week #37
Irrelevant things #
We, software developers, love maintainable code and perfect processes. This strive for perfection is also dangerous: it can easily cloud our vision and make it harder to focus on things that really matter.
Why Amazon Has No Profits (And Why It Works) #
Incoherent bits of knowledge about Amazon mixed with their financial reports. Seems like this is enough to reverse-engineer some of the internals of the e-commerce giant. Highly recommended read.
SOA. Overview. #
Yet another overview of SOA. It’s full of references and I’m not even half-way through checking them all, but so far it’s been a good entry point for the evening reads.
If you want to start a startup, go work for someone else #
Ben tries to go against the flow of ‘Just do it’ and find some facts to strengthen the opposite hypothesis. I always thought that the startup community (and by that I mean HN) is a bit erratic and often driven by cool stories more than the cold boring logic or science. It’s great to see something different from time to time.
Understanding and tuning your Solr caches #
If you deal with solr and have performance issues, its built in caching might help. But you need to understand what is what first…
New features in Rails 4.2 #
What it says on the tin.
An Explanation of Urinals and Urinal Culture #
An extremely entertaining read about urinals and technical, design and social problems related to them.
If programming languages were weapons #
Another one for the lolz.