2019-04-24

John Barton
Yep, a newsletter
Yep, a newsletter

Good afternoon Hecate fans. I hope you had a good Easter break if you live in one of those places where you get one, and I hope you had a good old regular if you don’t.

Tech

Avoiding Double Payments in a Distributed Payments System
Great post on designing robust idempotent APIs and very upfront about the trade-offs within. Worth reading for anyone that writes code that will cross a network boundary at any point.

Why don’t we have Wayland yet?!
It’s a post about Wayland support in Raspberry Pi, but is a good overview to catch you up on the history of Wayland and the varying obstacles along the way.

How I use Postgres with Go
Helpful list of tools and practices for using Postgres with Go that all work together well.

How to “try again” when exceptions happen in Ruby
Oldie but a goodie. Clever ruby trick to create recoverable errors. Handy for within a job queuing situation talking to flaky APIs (not looking at you GitHub).

The Fargate Illusion
This article highlights perfectly why that although I have access to free credits for Amazon, I’m still hosting on Heroku.

Business & Management

Finding the space to take the risk and build as a parent with bills.
Can someone start a support group for founders with toddlers? I’ll join. Glad to see this topic talked about more.

When Your Startup Fails
Very raw story of how it feels to wrap up a funded business. The details are very different to my experience wrapping up a startup (not this one, don’t worry) but the broad strokes feel the same.

The PARA Method: A Universal System for Organizing Digital Information
The one taxonomy to rule them all! My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable. I’m a week or so deep into trying this out. Seems OK.

Using 6 Page and 2 Page Documents To Make Organizational Decisions
All aboard with the hype for Amazon style written narratives but have no idea on how to actually write one? This is the perfect resource, both in content and structure.

Startup Stock Options – Why A Good Deal Has Gone Bad
The history of stock options in the tech industry and why they no longer work so well for employees, at least compared to founders. Covers everything from Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1950s up to now.

Culture

The Best Books on Political Philosophy
A list of books about a niche topic. The bread and butter of this newsletter. I’m looking forward to reading them.

The Innovators
A really techy discussion between film directors James Cameron and Jon Favreau about how shooting films is changing. For what it’s worth, I thought Avatar was hot garbage.

Before Fyre Festival, There was Woodstock ‘99
If you watched the Fyre festival documentaries are were left craving for more tails of music festivals gone bad, take this short trip down memory lane to last over-hyped tyre fire of an event.

Twenty-First Century Victorians
It’s nice to know that the gross feeling hyper-optimising meditating fasting startup peeps and wholesome perfect instagram parents give me has a historical antecedent. Gives me hope that the culture is due to spit out another Oscar Wilde.

Contractually Obligated Nautical Fact

Shipwreck reveals ancient market for knock-off consumer goods
If you thought shiploads of Chinese knock-offs sold around the world was a purely modern state of affairs boy do I have news for you.

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