Thoughts on programming podcasts

Do you remember any movies or pictures about the "Gold Rush" in America? When thinking about getting knowledge today I imagine exactly that: a man with a sieve filtering out a lot of dirt just to find a tiny golden nugget. It's not like there is a website where you can go and read all the facts that YOU don't know but should. Acquiring knowledge is a work of going through a lot of information and finding missing parts for your puzzle. I probably sound like an obsessed person but that's because I am obsessed.

Today I going to talk about one such dirt-gold source, namely podcasts. I've been listening to a lot of these lately and, honestly, 95% is useless crap:

  • things that you do know
  • things that you don't need to know
  • things that you aren't ready to know

But every now and then you stumble upon something brilliant so a 5% that's left make all the difference. Following suggestions will help you to get the maximum out of it:
There's no use if you aren't paying attention, so save them for "activities" like waiting in line for a doctor, public transport, driving, cooking and etc.
You should make notes of what you've learned. It has the following benefits:

  1. the very activity of trying to summarize information makes you understand it better;
  2. I find it motivating when you can go back and look at the gist you've written;
  3. retrieving information from your memory noticeably facilitates further memory consolidaton.

Finally I will throw some podcasts I listened to:

  1. Changelog - news and discussions on hot topics
  2. Coderpath - stories about programming life
  3. Giant robots smashing into other gians robots - not particulary useful, but fun
  4. InfoQ - not really a podcast because often it's hard to follow idea without provided PDF slides by hand. Otherwise really good website, covers lot of topics
  5. JavaPosse - topic titles sound good, but terrible audio quality
  6. Pragmatic bookshelf - authors about their books
  7. Ruby Rogues - my favourite, best podcast on Ruby
  8. RubyShow - dense with useful info
  9. Ruby5 - short news
  10. SE Radio - very different topics, more enterprise than agile focused
  11. The Dev Show - fuuuuun
ps sorry but I really suck at placing commas in English =(

Popular posts from this blog

Next.js: restrict pages to authenticated users

Image
Many websites have pages that need to be restricted to authenticated users, for example profile pages or dashboards. Next.js web framework comes with a lot of functionality built-in JS compilation, rendering code on server and caching. When it comes to most other aspecs, it's up to a programmer to build, including such needed functionality as restricting access to some pages only to authenticated users. In this article we are going to build just that: a function that augments a page object, that could be used like that: Here's the implementation in TypeScript: In order to make it work on server we are going to need one more utility function fetchWithCookies . When making HTTP request from inside a Web Browser, the browser automatically sends cookies with each requests and then stores new cookies if a response comes in with set-cookie header. On server-side we need to build this feature ourselves, because neither Next.js nor NodeJS make any a
Read more

HTTP server in Ruby 3 - Fibers & Ractors

Image
This is part #2. Head over to part #1 to learn about HTTP in Ruby. Motivation Historically Ruby's been lacking in the concurrency department. Ruby has "native" threads (prior to 1.9 there were only "green"), which means there can be multiple threads controlled by an OS, but only 1 thread can be executed at a time, this is managed via Global Interpreter Lock (GIL). However, native calls and I/O calls can be executed in parallel. During an I/O call, a thread gives up control and waits for a signal that the I/O has finished. This means I/O heavy applications can benefit from multiple threads. In this article we are going to explore different concurrency modes for our HTTP server: Single-threaded Multi-threaded Fibers Ractors Single-threaded Let's start simple and see how a single threaded HTTP server could look like ( full code ): def start socket = TCPServer.new(HOST, PORT) sock
Read more

Using image loader is Next.js

Image
Next.js has managed to kill off create-react-app and despite new rivals (in the face of Remix) is a de-facto way to start new React apps. One of the awesome features that Next.js and its platform Vercel provides is a way to automatically optimize images for different screens to make both user and developer experience much smoother. However, if your app has any non-trivial number of images that are generated by users you may soon end up visiting Vercel's limits page . Turns out that even on Hobby and Pro plans you are limited to 1000 and 5000 images per month, any overage is going to cost you dearly. At this point, you are going to start shopping for alternative image optimization solutions. You can either host your own via Thumbor or imgproxy or use one of the hosted solutions like Cloudinary . Regardless of what service you choose, it needs to be integrated into Next.js. After taking a look at Cloudinary as an example, even their free plan o
Read more