Roundup: Git file systems, ABBA puns, PostgreSQL exercises, Netflix’s spot instance marketplace, url punctuation, & more!
Murray Steele
Dec. 8, 2017
Black Mirror Season 4 - James C
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2017/12/black-mirror-season-four-heres-the-release-date-and-all-seven-trailers/
Black Mirror Season 4 is being released on Netflix on 29th December. ’Nuff said!
Taking Git virtual file system to macOS, Linux - Elena T
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/11/microsoft-and-github-team-up-to-take-git-virtual-file-system-to-macos-linux/
Initially git wasn’t designed for large numbers of developers (more than 3000), actively working on a codebase. As a consequence of Microsoft deciding to use git for its internal Windows development, it has needed to make some changes to git in order to handle the type of workload they have. These changes are now being merged upstream into git.
PostgreSQL Exercises - Charlie E
https://pgexercises.com
I think this is one of the best SQL learning resources I’ve seen. It’s got a simple interactive UI, and has a pretty wide range of queries to test your PostgreSQL skills.
Watch the world burn - Elena T
http://ohmyco.in/charts/#/gemini/BTC-USD
A nice graphic chart of Bitcoin’s current rise (and perhaps fall). Entertaining to watch.
The Eternal Cost Savings of Netflix’s Internal Spot Market - Charlie E
http://highscalability.com/blog/2017/12/4/the-eternal-cost-savings-of-netflixs-internal-spot-market.html
This is a write up of Netflix’s internal EC2 spot market. They reserve lots of instances (as it’s economic to do so) for handling viewer traffic but when viewers aren’t viewing they put them to work on static encoding jobs for upcoming shows and films.
Why does man print “gimme gimme gimme” after midnight? - Elena T
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/405783/why-does-man-print-gimme-gimme-gimme-at-0030
An Abba pun, taken to the next level.
Underscores vs. hyphens - Murray S
https://medium.com/humane-tech/underscores-optimization-arms-races-b34f0dfa4357
A bit of internet history about why we use hyphens to separate words in url these days when in the past we used underscores or other delimiters. Unsurprisingly the answer is “because google”, but the article suggests that while that’s the real answer maybe it’s not a good enough one. Our relationship with google changed from it being a service that tried to understand our content to one that dictated the form of our content.
Track of the Week - Dawn T
The most Christmassy non-Christmas song I know, made famous (for me anyway) as the soundtrack to The Office Christmas Special. Something to soothe the hangovers in the aftermath of our own Christmas office party.