Welcome to my PinkLetter. A short, weekly, technology-agnostic, and pink newsletter where we cultivate timeless skills about web development.
My Ramblings This Week
How was your week?
I feel great about mine: I got shit done and spent time with other human beings.
I’m task-oriented, thus moving things to done makes me happy. Surprise!
Unfortunately, nurturing relationships doesn’t come natural to me. There’s prolly a ticket with your name on my Kanban board. Sorry.
But it doesn’t matter.
What counts is the good vibes and shared experiences that come out of it.
This week, I played chess on the banks of a river, discovered a friend applied to become an astronaut, and two psychologists taught me the pros and cons of CBT vs psychodynamic in psychotherapy.
It was so cool, and I’m looking forward to more. So please reply to this email if you want to have a chat or do anything together!
Elsewhere on the Web
What Makes Quantum Computing So Hard to Explain? by Scott Aaronson
Quantum computers, you might have heard, are magical uber-machines that will soon cure cancer and global warming by trying all possible answers in different parallel universes. For 15 years, on my blog and elsewhere, I’ve railed against this cartoonish vision, trying to explain what I see as the subtler but ironically even more fascinating truth.
Programming Without Type Classes by Berlin Functional Programming Group
Type classes have become a cornerstone of statically-typed functional programming, powering abstractions like monoid and monad. Yet, type classes often have generalized names, which don’t reflect their purpose in specific domains; and they incur higher learning costs, especially when emulated in languages without them.
(Riccardo: Where are all the Elm haters that have been complaining about the lack of type classes?)
Finding Service Boundaries by Udi Dahan
Although Service-Oriented Architecture is a fairly well-known topic, there are very few good examples out there of the application of SOA principles to non-trivial domains so developers don’t have much to learn from. In this presentation, Udi will show a case study from the healthcare domain resulting in services so autonomous they almost don’t have to share any data with each other – whether that’s through request/response, events, or via a shared data store.
(Riccardo: You probably don’t need SOA and microservices. But if you do, Udi is the authority.)