Reading-Summary 2019-01

Becoming a magician

If you want to become a ‘magician’, the ones that with intricate moves and skills to amaze the audience, you’ll need to adopt a growing mindset:

you cannot become a ‘magician’ with the same progress rate, or by simply imagining a better self: sometimes the way to changes involves a fundamental shift in how you see the world. And to achieve that you’ll need to observe fellow ‘magicians’, learn the difference, and make non-linear progresses.

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Reading-Summary 2018-05

Posts I found interesting during my reading:

Writing a Time Series Database from Scratch

The author’s experience in writing a time-series database from groundup, for Prometheus.

Introducing Thanos: Prometheus at Scale

The effort to scale Prometheus with a new project Thanos, with Kubernetes sidecar pattern, to read data from individual nodes, pre-process (e.g. sampling), and submit to a centralized data storage and display.

A Beginner’s Guide To Scaling To 11 Million+ Users On Amazon’s AWS

What kind of machine/cluster you’ll need for different size of user base (from 1 to billions).

Nexflix FlameScope

A display of CPU trace as a Github-style texture tiles.

A Usable C++ Dialect that is Safe Against Memory Corruption

IT-‘No Bug’-Hare is an interesting blog I found recently, focused on system, C++ language and game design. A good read for C++ fanatics and system designers.


I’m feeling guilty for not updating for so long. But on the bright side: I’m back.

As a part of work requirements I’m taking on Golang and some small distributed system design jobs. It’s an interesting language for this task: network, systems, infrastructures, etc. I’m having mixed but mostly positive feelings about this language, and maybe will share my experience when I got a chance.

Reading Summary 2017-06

It’s been a while since I ever post a reading summary never mention a new blog post. Writing is a time demanding job.

Society and Technology

Why do we manage academia so badly?

"Managers want metrics that are easy to calculate, easy to understand, and quick to yield a value … metrics with these desirable properties are almost always worse than useless."

Easy metrics are also easily “hacked” - people “hack” the metrics to make statistics look good, while deviate from the original purpose of academia: to achieve good quality research.

See also:

Every attempt to manage academia makes it worse

Did Reddit’s April Fool’s gag solve the issue of online hate speech?

An interesting, anarchic style experiment on Reddit: let thousands of Redditers draw a picture all at the same time, what would possibly happen? It turned out to be surprisingly good.

Tim Berners-Lee: I invented the web. Here are three things we need to change to save it

Tim Berners-Lee: The Father of the World Wide Web and Turing Award winner believes the web nowadays has serious flaws, namely the loss of control of personal privacy, rampant spreading of misinformation on the web, and manipulations from the political campaigns online. It took everyone to build the web we have today, and it takes everyone to fix it now.

More reports and readings on Tim Berners-Lee:

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