Monthly update #1
My projects, a book recommendation, and a quote
Hi Friends,
This month has been quite busy, with work, climbing, ceramics course, and other odd bits and nibbs. To be honest, I find it hard to focus on this newsletter. It takes a lot of time to write high quality posts, and doing it along side a full-time job and other hobbies is not too easy. But it is fun to write, so I will keep going. Just have to plan it better into my daily schedule.
Here is a few updates about my projects, a book recommendation, and a fun quote.
Project updates:
This newsletter is going alright. I am happy as long as I keep posting every week. I am still not getting any external views (just me and my girlfriend), so I guess I should start posting my posts in places like reddit and hackernews. But, I am hesitant because I don’t feel like my posts are good enough. Imposter’s syndrome.
The “first house buyer” app is slowly going forward. I did a market analysis and realized that the market for this app in Norway is too small for the amount of time it takes to build the app. So, I am contemplating reducing the scope of the app.
I just started on a fun Christmas tree lightning project with colleagues at work. You are going to be able to create python scripts to control the LED lights at a Christmas tree to create your own lightning patterns. There is gonna be a web server running on a Raspberry Pi, an RQ job queue for scheduling the different lightning patterns, and a Frontend where you can upload lightning pattern files and control the jobs, available at the office network.
Book recommendation:
Understanding Distributed Systems by Roberto Vitillo. Really good overview for understanding all the different parts of a big distributed software system, such as Netflix. It focuses on providing an understanding rather than going into too much detail. It lacks information about security, real-time systems and safety-critical systems, but these are too big topics in such a book.
Quote:
One of the many great quotes from the book Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut:
Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before,” Bokonon tells us. “He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.
Have a great week,
Eric