Links for the Week of September 12

• This week Uber got owned, which prompted a lot of thinking about authentication and authorization
• Xe Iaso saw that and made the case that push 2fa is considered harmful. I think this is where corporations are going, but not sure it's ready yet for wide distribution. (And I'm ready for the "considered harmful" phrasing to be considered harmful...)
• Phil Eaton's go-sqlite3-stdlib is an interesting project that provides a set of common golang functions for interacting with sqlite databases. Rather than relying on sqlean, they chose to reimplement and add on several other features as well.
• Tyler Langlois does some quality performance engineering to measure caddy vs nginx, specifically as reverse proxies. My general take from it: they came out close and it's pretty much a coin flip.
• Matt Holt, the caddy author, found a performance regression from that post - metrics were causing too much overhead how they were implemented. I was impressed with the speed and responsiveness of caddy's developers.
• David R. MacIver wrote part 2 of a series on estimation - I enjoyed this as well as the other posts in the series a lot.
• I like 18f's document on language and framework selection
• Aidan Steele wrote a useful thread on AWS design patterns
• Tom MacWright ported a javascript ray tracer from javascript to zig, and wrote a reflection on the port and also on the value of play
• Julia Evans drew an excellent debugging manifesto comic
• Jason Scott reflects on the development of the internet
• Robin Sloan wrote about creating an app strictly for friends and family. I love this idea and wish it weren't so painful to do. Security balances against usefulness.
• Coda Hale wrote about how work scales in organizations
• Jacob Kaplan-Moss argues that "a group of mediocre programmers working with a structure designed to produce quality will produce better software than a group of fantastic programmers working in a system designed with other goals." in Quality is Systemic
• We all know that global variables are bad, but Forrest Smith argues that they're even worse than we think, and programming languages should make them harder to use than they already are
• Tim Morgan wrote a ruby compiler, and reflects on the process of building it and building software for personal joy

Music

• Not sure why, but I listened to the Beatles a lot this week

Book

This week I started reading Deep Learning and the Game of Go (github repo). I created a repository with my implementations and notes about it. More on this later this week, hopefully.