Meet Gor | Techstructive Weekly #22

This is the last edition for 2024; the next edition will be on 3rd January 2025.

This week again was a bit slow or not much happened. I recorded 2 videos and did a live stream to solve some pending problems and that was it. At work, I completed the thing that I was supposed to do this quarter and I couldn’t be happier, definitely, there are things to improve on, but I like where I stand.

The Sunday was extremely lazy for me, didn’t do anything. Was a bit tired and just read and completed a book that I have been reading “The Graveyard Book” by Neil Gaiman. It was a good one, I really loved the way the author brought the dead people to life and the most enjoyable part was the sense of humor in this.

I have a pretty long list of things to be done for the last week of 2024, let’s see how many I am able to wrap up before the world ends. One thing that will definitely come is the 2024 Developer Retro, a developer retrospective that I have been doing for the past 2 years and will stick to this year as well. So keep an eye out on the 31st for the post to go live. I will be reading other’s retrospectives as well.

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Quote of the week

"The most effective way to do it, is to do it."

— Amelia Earhart

The most effective way to record video is to just hit that record button, just do it. That’s what has been for me in this week, to keep going in the low times and just keep on creating videos, writing articles, creating projects, even if no one notices it, I am the one benefiting from it, no one else necessarily needs to, I am more than happy if someone finds it helpful.

Created

Advent of Code 2024 in Golang, Day 4 This was recorded on a Saturday night, so I was just crunching out the advent of code problems on live streams and then took an hour break and back to video recording and completed this video.Double click to interact with video
Advent of Code 2024 in Golang, Day 5 This was a breeze, I recorded the video inside an hour with the flow. I just hit record and completed the voice-over along with the explanation on the go, which boosted my confidence to a new level while creating videos. I didn’t know when time flew by when I completed recording the first part and the video was 33 minutes long! Phew that was a good video, my longest video so far.

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Read

Karan from Zerodha on Open Source tools and Observability
This was a good post, I learned a lot of things from this about how the giant trading app Zerodha has a few engineers and how they are managing the engineering and infrastructure. Also, the love for open source and appreciation of the tools that they use from the CTO is a sign of a healthy developer relationship.

SRE StoriesKaran from Zerodha on Open-Source Tools and ObservabilityKaran - a Software Developer specializing in Infrastructure/Ops and Observability at Zerodha talks about his SRE journey which comes from years of hands-on experience and a practical mindset…Read more6 months ago · 5 likes · Prathamesh Sonpatki

Cognitive load is what matters: This is really a nice point, making good look smart is going to cost in longer run, keep it simple and avoid the perfect code trap is what I learned from this post. You might write a 200 IQ 3 lines of code, but someone else the future maintaining the code, might take 200 minutes to understand what the heck is the edge in that, which might make the cognitive load way to much than the actual business logic load.
Precomputation - James’ Coffee Blog This is also an interesting observation made by the author, SSGs, Wikipedia, rely on this reverse index, i.e. mapping sites (HTML) to URLs that improve the response speed and load on the server, but it is not always a good idea to do that, there are uses of this in its own territory.

Watched

Are we Cooked with Open AI o3 This was a good take, I think we should not forget the fundamentals, as well as not lose track of what is happening in the world. But not to get too lost in them that we forget the main objective, to have fun and learn new things.

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Why every developer should post on Youtube:
This is another good take, If you post something out to the public, you are not just ahead of others but also improving on your communication skills. I started posting on youtube just to improve my communication skills, and to overcome a creative slump that I had since I got converted to full-time at work. It’s nothing to do with work, but I just needed a attitude shift towards how I approach my goals moving ahead as a developer.

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FreeCodeCamp Podcast/Interview with Dennis Ivy (host Quincy Larson)
Dennis is a humble and hard-working guy, he thaught me Django, and with that, I have started my career with a remote internship that might have landed me where I am today, truly grateful for him. About his journey as a person, it is really amazing, I ahven’t completed the full video, but till what I listened to, it was inspiring and relatable.

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Learnt

Learning about PubNub in Python (Publisher Subscriber architecture) for Event-driven applications:
I wanted to fix a task at my work and that required me to learn about the specifics of how the application sends the message for certain event and the frontend responds to those events. It was a great little thing to learn by actually solving the bug.
Python’s dictonaries really give me troubles, I don’t know I am spoiled from Golang or from Python. But mutation of variables is just garbage compared to golang at least. I want to write a post about it clarifying how to carefully use copy, deepcopy and direct mutation in Python.

Tech News

Google using Anthropic Claude AI to train its own AI: This is gross, wild, I mean we all expected this to happen at some point, but from Google, really? Ai using AI to get more AI. Google has never been in the race to be honest in this AI hype (well now its over 2 years, we can stop calling it hype, AI ERA). Bard couldn’t keep up with GPT 3.5 and hence they renamed to Gemini and still gemini is not comparable to OpenAI or Claude. Makes sense they are using Claude to train the new model (what will be its name, -2 steps from GPT :)
OpenAI’s o3 model is scaling but with cost (maybe not with performance XD): This is a huge cost, just compare it with the normal 4o or Haiku, it is a gazillion times much better.
Ghostty Terminal Released: This is something to try out on the next weekend. This is the terminal emulator created by the author of Terraform, Vault, Nomad, Vagrant, etc. and he has co-founded Hashicorp, so something serious cooking here.

For more news, follow the Hackernewsletter and for software development/coding articles, join daily.dev . Sadly the Hackernews newsletter edition #727 has not yet dropped in, maybe its the holiday season so a off week for them.

That’s it from this 22 edition of my weekly learning, hope you enjoyed it, and leave comments on what you think about some of my takes or any feedback.