#260 – April 22, 2018
Tech, but weird: If you're a developer with a taste for oddball tech links, Bizarro Devs is the newsletter for you. Hit both sides of your personality with just one funny newsletter.
In India, Pannini creates an exact and complete description of the Sanskrit language, including pronunciation. Sanskrit could be recreated using nothing but Pannini's grammar. Pannini's grammar is probably the first formal system of any kind, predating Euclid.
Distributed architecture concepts I learned while building a large payments system
I joined Uber two years ago as a mobile software engineer with some backend experience. I ended up building the payments functionality in the app - and rewriting the app on the way. Afterwards, I ended up moving into engineering management, heading up the team itself. This meant getting exposed to more backend, as my team is responsible for many of the backend systems that enable payments.
When engineers talk about any existing piece of technology - for example League of Legends patch 8.4 - we often talk about tech debt. I define tech debt as code or data that future developers will pay a cost for.
The latest trend for tech interviews: Days of unpaid homework
Last year, a company that was interested in hiring me as a software developer asked me to build a food delivery application for a fictional restaurant, as a way to test my coding abilities. I was a bit shocked. The time commitment for building an entire application from scratch can be substantial, and the homework assignment didn’t pay.
Dependency Injection Demystified
"Dependency Injection" is a 25-dollar term for a 5-cent concept. That's not to say that it's a bad term... and it's a good tool. But the top articles on Google focus on bells and whistles at the expense of the basic concept. I figured I should say something, well, simpler.