Andy's discoveries and musings - Issue #6
This week, it is going to be a fairly “direct, and to-the-point” newsletter. No musical interludes, no “older” stories. I didn’t get a lot of writing of my own done last week, although I started on some new personal projects, of which more soon; and I’ll be taking some time off from some others.
One fun thing this past weekend, has been learning to play Wingspan, one of the most popular boardgames from 2019/2020 (if you also enjoy boardgames, find me on BoardGameGeek).
I’ve made another adjustment to the newsletter itself, with the new formatting that is available. Apart from that, without major preamble, without extended personal content, here’s what caught my eye since last Monday.
Links I found interesting
My friend Terence has consistently been an advocate for better privacy, and better internet, in general (as well as being a very clever human), so when he surfaces one of these kinds of poor behaviours, it is worth a read.
Netflix has been the golden child of cloud infrastructure, APIs, microservices, distributed architectures, and so much more for the past decade. If Netflix makes a technical change, it is going to be something I’m going to pay attention to. When I was working on Cloud Foundry at VMware/Pivotal, Netflix was a constant source of inspiration and interest. Learning about how they are rebuilding their systems - again - was a dense, but informative, read.
The world went even more virtual this year, and some of the trends that have been bubbling away, yet not-quite-ready, have started to find traction. The first link I saw on this topic last week was the idea that SxSW will happen virtually; the next thing that happened was that Microsoft Ignite was very heavily slanted to their newly-announced Mesh Augmented and Mixed Reality platform (HoloLens and Oculus suddenly seem a whole lot more compelling). I wasn’t part of the Games at Work podcast this week, but my regular co-hosts spoke with our friend Ian “epredator” Hughes about what this all means.
Political / societal annoyance of the week was the news that despite many of us carefully following the rules, checking in to venues when we were outside of lockdown last year, for contact tracing, the data was barely used, if at all.
My rabbit holes...
I do not own a 3D printer, but when I saw this, I wanted one. Small batch personal 3D printing seems very unaffordable.
Bread-making, baking, and other hobbies have been huge over the past 12 months. My wife joked that I should make her one of these sourdough monitoring gadgets - the irony being, that I think I would only need a 3D printer to make the housing, and one additional component, to build something like this from my “parts box”.
Whilst looking around for new Raspberry Pi Pico projects, I came (back) across the PICO-8, which has nothing to do with the Pi Pico and has been around a lot longer - it’s an intentionally constrained, software games console, cross platform, written in Lua. I may be in love (or, again, down a rabbit hole of distraction). I was a bit disappointed when I realised that it doesn’t support networking or HTTP requests, but the games and apps are very well done. I’ll probably be exploring this for some time to come.
Thats it for this week - let me know what you’re thinking about!