In our first newsletter of 2021, let’s take a look at the best posts that I’ve read in… December 2020.

Featured posts

Ruby 3 released – A myth died, and Ruby 3 is finally released, actor-based concurrency model, JIT improvements, static analysis with RBS, and much more. Check it.

FLOATING POINT VISUALLY EXPLAINED – The “1.5 is the midpoint between 0 and infinity in Ruby” post references this post as a good resource to understand how computers deal with floats, and it is!

GitHub Universe 2020 – Latest news from GitHub Universe 2020, now we have a dark theme on GitHub and companies can sponsor open source developers through GitHub Sponsors! Check it out for all news.

New – Use Amazon EC2 Mac Instances to Build & Test macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS Apps – AWS released its macOS powered EC2 instances, you don’t need to create mac mini-farms anymore. Great!

How to Make Your Code Reviewer Fall in Love with You – Awesome! This post describes 13 tricks to make your code reviewer fall in love with you (I just fall reading it). Code review is a crucial part of every developer day nowadays, we need to pay more attention to good practices in this process, and a good point to start is applying the good practices of this post.

A Distributed Systems Reading List – A distributed systems read list with a lot of great resources, posts, papers, cases, and much more. If you love to read and study about distributed systems, check it.

Command Line Interface Guidelines – WOW! A very long post/guide that teaches you A LOT of good practices when developing CLIs. A lot of good points and good resources for further reading, it’s not good to read only one time, but to save it in bookmarks (Or star in Github) and read it every time that you develop a CLI.

How the Slowest Computer Programs Illuminate Math’s Fundamental Limits – Mind-blowing post about the challenge behind the “slowest computer program” ever run (Reading the post you’ll learn more about it, but an infinite loop isn’t valid), and how it can help understand math limits.

MISC

1.5 is the midpoint between 0 and infinity in Ruby – For Ruby, the middle point between 0 and infinity is 1.5, you want to know why? just check it! You’ll learn a bit about how Ruby interprets infinity, floats, and do a binary search.

ERROR HANDLING IS HARD – Error handling is hard and it needs to be thought about carefully, this post is short and brings good points and questions about what is a good error.

Gentle introduction to RSpec – When I started to learn Ruby, RSpec was very hard to understand, this post gives a great introduction to RSpec, and I think it can help beginners. (I already recommended it to my students)

Owning your onboarding (especially in remote work) – Onboarding is always hard, deal with imposter syndrome, questions, feedback, and much more. In remote work it can be harder (don’t panic), this post helps you with some tips.

Why scientists are turning to Rust – Scientists are starting to use Rust, this light post from Nature explains why some scientists are choosing rust over python to do their work.

Redis Topologies – This post talks about Redis topologies and explains each one and gives pros/cons. It will be very useful for those who are learning or want to learn more about Redis.

Kafka is not a database – Warning: Controversial Topic. Kafka has gained a lot of attention and popularity in the last year’s and some people use it as a database, this post talks about why the author thinks Kafka is not a database and shouldn’t be used as one.

The Modern JavaScript Tutorial – A modern javascript resource that starts from the beginning and covers a lot of concepts, it covers a lot of subjects and gives clear explanations, it can be used as a source to search when we have questions too. Looks good.

To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language – Read computer code is not the same for our brain as reading language. It uses a distributed network inside your brain. In this post, we can understand more about how it works and how it works with experienced programmers.

Recreating grep in Python – Want to learn python in a fun way, or how the famous grep works? This post can help you, while recreating it in python.