Looking within the lens

As seen at “Museo Camera“

Missing the web

From a recent HackerNews discussion about search engines, some harsh truth about the big shift in the last two decades:

>It is only more recently that they seem to have given up.
They haven’t given up; the OP has a point. The “sites” you are hoping for Google to return _don’t exist_. Any website online right now that doesn’t exist to drive ad revenue is exceedingly rare. In 2001, there were way more websites that existed just for fun; any tom, dick and harry could open up note pad and get a website online. That doesn’t exist anymore.
It’s my opinion that those who complain about Google search results are frustrated that Google can no longer find a web that no longer exists

Peak 5-minute books

The little wallet that could …

Recently became _aware_, for a few moments, of the wallet in my pocket.

I used to have a big, thick one I carried around everywhere.

One day, I got sick of it and looked into card wallet instead.

I ended up getting this Alpine Swiss wallet — when I initially got it, I was worried it would fall apart, but it has lasted for nearly a decade now

Random post 592817

I didn’t know “Dark Academia” was a thing, but it seems like a source of optimism.

All the speeches, right …

(I have a bad feeling this is going to be the most frequent kind of post here, but for now, let’s roll …)

Rust, Go, Clojure

This was a funny quote:

Many people try to compare Rust to Go, but this is flawed. Go is an ancient board game that emphasizes strategy. Rust is more appropriately compared to Chess, a board game focused on low-level tactics. Clojure, with its high-level purview, is a better analogy to the enduring game of stones.
From https://gist.github.com/oakes/4af1023b6c5162c6f8f0

Soylent emeralds is made of … dragons?

I said it but I didn’t do it, but here is one of those …. anomalies I mentioned earlier.

Spike is eating a “Soylent Emerald” snack.

Again, who is this for? It’s bizarre. But it exists.

(There are many more, I just haven’t taken a pic or sorted them or anything like that)

Anyway, this is from the sixth “Friendship is Magic” graphic novel I was reading with my daughter.

(Yes, I pre-ordered it 😐)

Scala -> Rust

Over the weekend, I took a first stab at transforming my prior little cave-generation toy (https://abacusnoir.blog/2020/08/02/cave-generation/) from Scala to Rust.

Old repo: https://bitbucket.org/agambrahma/caves/

New repo: https://bitbucket.org/agambrahma/caves/

A time of transition

I’ve been at Confluent for a year and half now, and it was fun in many ways, but I’ve decided upon a change, and I’m joining Sigma Computing next week.

Another instance where I was looking for a different “local maxima” but ended up finding a global maxima instead.

Everyone wants different things at different points, but Sigma feels like a sweet spot for me right now.

It’s not too big and not too small, with a rapidly growing engineering team, there is a whole different bunch of tech to learn from scratch, an opportunity to work on an end-to-end full-stack product while also having significant infrastructure challenges.

I’ve learnt a lot from the folks I’ve worked with at Confluent, and I’m excited to begin the new year on a new adventure 🙂