This time of the year provides a perfect excuse to reach out to now distant people. I checked it with a few of my former colleagues this week. It felt good to share stories and have a few laughs. Why not reach out to them?
Software Engineering ⚙️
MySQL Threads
Having too many threads in our MySQL DB is one of the top two reasons my team gets paged. So I wanted to understand what spins the threads up in the first place. In short, each DB connection reuses an existing thread or creates one new thread.
Chasing a Hung MySQL Transaction: InnoDB History Length Strikes Back
Growing InnoDB history length is the other top reason for our pages. When a long-running transaction prevents deletions from getting committed, the history length increases, and the DB slows down.
Could Rust be the Future of JavaScript Infrastructure?
This article surveys how JavaScript tools are adopting Rust to be faster.
People ❤️
A New Morality of Attainment (Goodhart’s Law)
I am excited that my org is putting more emphasis on setting success metrics on our projects and products. But I am also aware that metrics can be gamed and give a false sense of correctness. Goodhart’s Law states that
“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Business 💰
Calling the Shot: the Next Five Years at Riot Games
While I am not interested in working at Riot Games for the lack of diversity and inclusion (this post also calls it out), I did find Riot’s vision for the future compelling:
If we believe in a world where the biggest cinematic universes are rooted in games, the most popular music starts with games (K/DA anyone?), the most thriving sports are esports, and players are the driving force behind the biggest cultural moments, then what should we do over the next five years to get closer to that world?
Open source developer corrupts widely-used libraries, affecting tons of projects
The sustainability of open-source projects (especially, smaller projects with no backing company or foundation) has been questioned many times. This specific drama raises a louder alarm.
Interesting Finds 💡
Amazon Yankee Candle reviews are mirroring the COVID-19 surge — again
I heard about this study during my team chat. The study found a correlation between negative reviews with COVID cases in the US, which I found amusing.
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