Burn After Reading - Issue #7

Camper vans, locks, toilets, outsourcing technology, and some wonderful wonderful hackery, enjoy!

The “Eisenhower matrix” of urgent/important is a fairly well-known model, but if just knowing about a model solved problems, everything would be much easier - Joe Dunn’s “How to Dig Yourself Out of Overwhelm” covers a range of techniques and approaches to get yourself out of constantly feeling busy.

Isabelle and Antoine sold their house and everything in it, and moved into a self-built caravan - their build journal is incredibly thoroughly detailed, and a great read. Personally I’m too much of a fan of my home comforts, plus a terrible hoarder, but it’s still fun to vicariously enjoy the minimalism!

Matt Blaze’s paper on Master-Keyed Mechanical Locks leads with a nice introduction to how they work and some of their issues, following with an interesting rights-amplification attack for the more dedicated reader.

Physical infrastructure and systems can be fascinating - I really enjoyed this piece by David Fleming on the toilets in sports stadiums, covering materials, logistical considerations, gender issues and more.

Building things is hard, and inevitably people try to bite off more than they can chew - “Revisiting the Iterative Incremental Mona Lisa” by Steven Thomas illustrates terminology and techniques for breaking down work to help it actually get done.

The Unit of Caring points out the concept of “load-bearing” aspects of our day-to-day lives - habits/systems/features we can easily overlook but that provide significant value, such that they can have a disproportionately negative affect on us if they go away.

Finally, in “wtf I cannot believe we’re actually in this situation”, David MacIver suggests that if you’re in the UK, you should be stockpiling food for Brexit…

“The log/event processing pipeline you can’t have” is a great read by apenwarr, covering architectural design, assorted Linux internals, and some of the terrible terrible things that happen when you have to deal with real-world systems.

Owen Jacobson has assembled a substantial collection of reasons to avoid MySQL and choose something else - PostgreSQL is my go-to when it comes to relational databases.

I’m a frequent advocate for buying someone else’s solution to an already-solved problem over building your own (where possible). Charity Majors has assembled a series of guest posts on how to champion the outsourcing of your tooling, which I expect I’ll be using in the future!

Will Leinweber’s “\watch ing Star Wars in Postgres” is both a fun and impressive read about some interesting hackery, as well as a nice introduction to some PostgreSQL features I didn’t know about.

LD_PRELOAD lets you override symbols in any library, and Jessie Frazelle has assembled a great collection of slightly bonkers things people have done with it, as well as her own setup for Cloud Native Syscalls.

Finally, in “I can’t believe you did that with that”, Ben Evans presents a pure CSS still life: Water and Lemons

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed! As ever, feedback is appreciated in any form - whether via email, Twitter, or the thumbs-up button.

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Cheers, Kristian