Items of Interest

Netflix 40ms Bug

#243
John Blair, partner engineer at Netflix, published an interesting post about tracking down a bug in the Netflix Android application that was causing playback to stutter on a set-top box. Turns out an extra 40ms delay in thread management by Android was bubbling up to cause the playback to stutter. What I found interesting is the process of exploration using logging that John used to narrow down the delay.
Tech
Web Dev

The Podcast of The Week: Rhodes Center Podcast - The Fraught, Complex, and Important 'Economics of Belonging'

#242
The Rhodes Center Podcast is an economics podcast hosted by Mark Blyth from Brown University. In the episode The Fraught, Complex, and Important 'Economics of Belonging', Mark interviews Martin Sandbu about his new book The Economics of Belonging. The excellent interview covers the woes of the political and economic world and previews the solutions offered in the new book.
Business
Life
Podcast

Web Almanac 2020

#242
The HTTP Archive has published the 2020 Web Almanac, which combines the raw stats and trends of the TTP Archive with the expertise of the web community in order to document that latest start of the art on the web, from web development languages, to UX and deployment.
Web Dev

VLF Space Barrier

#242
NASA scientists have discovered an energy barrier around the earth that protects us from radiation and that is accidentally man made. The barrier is made of VLF (very low frequency) radio waves, which are generally used to communication with underwater submarines but have been leaking into the atmosphere.
Science
Space

Space Spiders

#242
Someone decided that it was a good idea to put spiders on the International Space Station! Experiments with the space spiders (!) have shown that the spiders need a point of reference when building their webs and that light can be used as that reference in the absence of gravity. With no point of reference the spiders spin symmetrical webs in zero-g.
Science
Space

Effective Reading

#241
I came across two great guides on effective reading this week, a detailed guide from Maarten Van Doorn and a more digestible guide from Denys Zhadanov. Both posts overlap on some great techniques on how to read with purpose, take notes, and recall and synthesis those notes into long term knowledge.
Life
Motivation

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