https://tomjowitt.com/Tom Jowitt writes about software engineering, startup leadership, and the avoidable complexity that shows up when building products and teams.https://tomjowitt.com/posts/newsletter-26-01-2025/My newsletters are a handful of articles I’ve read that I think are interesting enough to share. Enjoy! Doctrine Against the dark forest - Erin Kissane https://www.wrecka.ge/against-the-dark-forest/ Erin Kissane looks at how the big social networks have become hostile to human interaction and what we can do going forward. Interview with Marianne Bellotti - No Starch Press https://nostarch.com/blog/womens-history-month-spotlight-deal-3 Marianne Bellotti, the author of Kill It With Fire, a book I recommend to anyone, talks about her career.Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/newsletter-26-01-2025/https://tomjowitt.com/posts/go-standard-library-interfaces/This is a series of posts about Go basics with a focus on practical real-world examples. To read more in this series, click here. Go’s duck-typed interfaces are one of the languages most powerful features. The promotion of small, composable interfaces over large ones leads to flexible code that is easy to refactor, test and maintain. But this concept is not always apparent to new users of Go, especially if you’ve come from languages where interfaces are declared to be satisfied.Sun, 22 Dec 2024 00:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/go-standard-library-interfaces/https://tomjowitt.com/posts/newsletter-20-10-2024/My newsletters are a handful of articles I’ve read that I think are interesting enough to share. Enjoy! XOXO Talk - Molly White https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTaeVVAvk-c A call to arms from the ever brilliant Molly White. The Static Site Paradox - Loris Cro https://kristoff.it/blog/static-site-paradox/ The fast, modern web is only available to the tech-savvy. Everyone else is stuck with Wix or Wordpress. We’ve built a two-tiered web where it’s very difficult for your average user to learn basic html and get a creative, fun personal site up.Sun, 20 Oct 2024 00:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/newsletter-20-10-2024/https://tomjowitt.com/posts/newsletter-05-10-2024/My newsletters are a handful of articles I’ve read that I think are interesting enough to share. Enjoy! Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People - NSA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si9iqF5uTFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW7ZHpKuqZg In this two-part lecture from 1982, the original gangster of software, Grace Hopper, schools the present day from the 1980s. An essential watch. Notes on building event-driven systems - Redowan Delowar https://rednafi.com/misc/notes_on_event_driven_systems/ A great explainer of the concepts and patterns of event-driven systems.Sat, 05 Oct 2024 08:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/newsletter-05-10-2024/https://tomjowitt.com/posts/the-tech-hiring-process/The tech hiring market is slow at the moment. Companies have significantly reduced their workforces and are holding off filling positions until the economic outlook improves. This situation is especially tough for graduates and juniors. Still, even people with years of experience find landing a role much more challenging than it was a couple of years ago. I’ve been talking to friends a lot about this recently, so I thought I’d consolidate my experience into a post in the hope that it’s helpful to anyone looking for a tech job.Tue, 17 Sep 2024 00:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/the-tech-hiring-process/https://tomjowitt.com/posts/newsletter-14-09-2024/My newsletters are a handful of articles I’ve read that I think are interesting enough to share. Enjoy! PostNL’s Serverless Journey - Luc van Donkersgoed https://medium.com/postnl-engineering/business-overview-f7c8d8ebee2c This comprehensive overview of rolling out a serverless architecture on AWS at PostNL is an excellent read. I’ve been on a similar journey, at a smaller scale, and wish I had some of this wisdom before I started. Your Name In Landsat - NASA https://landsat.Sat, 14 Sep 2024 08:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/newsletter-14-09-2024/https://tomjowitt.com/posts/chestertons-fence/In 1929, G.K. Chesterton wrote: In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law ; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.Sat, 14 Sep 2024 00:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/chestertons-fence/https://tomjowitt.com/posts/zero-dependencies-in-go/Tim Bray created a badge for projects that have zero dependencies. A noble cause! https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/09/04/0dependencies Go makes zero dependencies reasonably easy compared to other languages, but that’s not to say you shouldn’t use any. In my day-to-day work I rely on a handful of tried and tested dependencies for a lot of my project work: Chi for routing, although I haven’t had the chance to assess the updates to the stdlib http package that came in Go 1.Thu, 12 Sep 2024 00:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/zero-dependencies-in-go/https://tomjowitt.com/posts/a-love-letter-to-go/The Go programming language (or golang) left beta twelve years ago, and version 1 was released which means I’ve been writing Go on and off for 12 years now. Go came along at the perfect time. I was in the middle of evaluating languages for work as we were experiencing scaling issues with an existing codebase and needed a new approach. My simple shortlist of requirements was: Performant Statically-typed Supports concurrency Runs on Linux Simple to learn, write and maintain Preferably C-like syntax.Sun, 08 Sep 2024 00:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/a-love-letter-to-go/https://tomjowitt.com/posts/newsletter-05-09-2024/My newsletters are a handful of articles I’ve read that I think are interesting enough to share. Enjoy! The Hunt for the Missing Data Type - Hillel Wayne https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/graph-types/ Hillel Wayne takes a look at graphs and asks why they’re so poorly supported by general programming languages and tooling considering how ubiqitous they are to our jobs. A lot of this struck a chord with me. Working with graphs always involves a lot of setup before you can even begin to start work on the problem at hand.Thu, 05 Sep 2024 08:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/newsletter-05-09-2024/https://tomjowitt.com/posts/newsletter-29-03-2024/My newsletters are a handful of articles I’ve read that I think are interesting enough to share. Enjoy! Utilizing Machine Learning to Curate TIDAL’s Daily Discovery https://developer.tidal.com/blog/utilizing-machine-learning-to-curate-tidals-daily-discovery It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of TIDAL. Recently, I’ve been reading their open-source discussions and writing some code against their API. One thing they’ve done is open-source their recommendation algorithms. Even if you’re not interested in the technicalities of the ML process, it’s a great write-up to understand how companies think through recommendations.Fri, 29 Mar 2024 08:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/newsletter-29-03-2024/https://tomjowitt.com/posts/a-love-letter-to-rss/Netscape first released RSS on March 15th, 1999. 25 years ago today. RSS is one of the cornerstones of the open web. Just think about how often you’ve heard “Listen and subscribe from wherever you get your podcasts” and what that statement actually means. Podcasts using RSS as their distribution protocol means you can use your favourite audio player software without worrying about missing out on content because it’s unavailable on that platform.Fri, 15 Mar 2024 08:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/a-love-letter-to-rss/https://tomjowitt.com/posts/til-github-atom-feeds/Today, I learned that you can add .atom to the end of most GitHub URLs (releases, discussions, etc.) and get an RSS content feed. I’m not sure why this isn’t a feature in the web interface. It’s very useful. Eg. To get a feed of releases from a repo: https://github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/releases becomes https://github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/releases.atomFri, 01 Mar 2024 08:57:57 +1100https://tomjowitt.com/posts/til-github-atom-feeds/