Evan Jones published an interesting and helpful article on the differences between ordered data structures and hash-tables, and when is best to use them.
The New York Times published a fantastic exposé and data visualistion site about the scale of gathering and selling of location data. They obtained a file with 50 billion location pings of 12 million Americans and sifted through the data in horror. The data can be bought from data aggregation companies that offer data collected from apps on your smartphone, like news or coupons apps, not from telecom companies or the big tech companies.
Working in software, I sometimes run into problems convincing project stakeholders about the purpose and limitations of project specs. This blog post from Seth Godin about defining the problem first and aiming to solve it, rather than aiming to write a spec for it, is absolute gold.
A comment on HackerNews eventually led to four and a half new unicode symbols being added to represent the commonly understood power symbols. Four symbols are brand new, and one is repurposed (hence the half).
The new Star Wars spin-off show The Mandalorian uses the Unreal game engine to dynamically generate responsive backgrounds onto a LED wall behind the actors. The engine can dynamically change the perspective of the scene based on the position of the camera to create a parallax effect in real time.
Viyo is a service that allows you to turn any device with a camera and a browser into a security camera. The free tier supports one device and unlimited usage.
Haki Benita has a great post describing 12 common mistakes and missed opportunities when using SQL, such as being careful when diving integers and avoiding transformations on indexed fields.
Hiring Lab published a post about the top trending tech skills from 2014 to 2019 based on job advertisements on indeed.com. Python is on the rise but Java remains kind of the hill.
In 1984, the band Prodigal embedded a Commodore 64 easter egg program in their vinyl album Electric Eye. Check out this video by 8-Bit Show and Tell who extracts the program from vinyl to tape and loads it onto a C-64!
