Grisha Trubetskoy

Surprised no one seems to have mentioned the godfather of CS books, The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie [0]. At first glance, it's a programming language book rather than a "computer science" book, but you probably won't think that by the time you're finished ...

First, every operating system you'll use - likely in your lifetime - is a giant mountain of C code. From the kernel all the way to the userspace utilities. As a programmer, your career will be forged on the shoulders of giants, and those giants wrote in C. So to understand how your machine works, you must learn C.

Second, K&R covers far more than just a language - it presents a system of thinking about computing. It covers algorithms for line counting, memory allocation, and the construction of linked lists. The techniques you learn for pointer manipulation will enable you to author implementations of data structures that are considerably more elegant and simple than the naive methods [2].

It contains fundamental, influential insights about the computer science field on nearly every page.

Still, I'd discourage you from writing C professionally if you can help it. Rust retains nearly all the advantages of C while abandoning its unsafe memory model and replacing it with compile-time determined allocations and de-allocations. As roughly 70% of CVEs in C or C++ projects are caused by memory unsafety, this is a significant feature [1]. But the insights you make in studying K&R will…

I used to be a Java dev (6 years ago)...

Over the last year I've been learning JavaScript + React (frontend) and TypeScript + Node.js (backend) for a side project. At times it's great because you can cobble together all these small modules to build something really quickly and other times.... everything gets updating so often and apis change.....oh I'm going to create a new project.... xyz module needs dependency abc...blablabla.

Also JS on the server is synchronous which is not natural for me to write it. I end up using async/await everywhere except for a few places.

So I've been thinking about to concentrating on a more stable eco-system so I can really master it. With that in mind, I've started learning Golang. Great if you're interested in web servers and distributed systems. It makes concurrency easy and it runs fast. Check out this post: https://grisha.org/blog/2017/04/27/simplistic-go-web-app/

For data you could use Python (#1) but I understand Golang is also a respectable in this arena but probably not the best.

I'm looking for this too. Advice welcome. AWS managed time series is not a thing.

Timestream has been in preview for too long. Does that mean they're having trouble with productizing it?

You can host anything in OP article in EC2 but you don't get the managed features. PLUS most of those (eg timescale and influxdb) are seriously priced for serious features like clustering/scaling/HA.

Plain Old Posgres is not awful for TS [1] but I'm also looking for something better.

At $work, we're considering Plain Old Elastic, which is a managed service. It scales well and if you don't have mountains of data, there shouldn't be surprises. If you do have mountains of data, and you can tolerate older stuff being slower in archive, you can throw it in S3 and query it with Athena, while keeping the faster stuff in ES or Dynamo.

https://grisha.org/blog/2015/09/23/storing-time-series-in-postgresql-efficiently/

A post [1] shared a couple of days ago made a thesis that BTC price needs to grow for it to become a viable "store of value." Maybe this is what we are seeing.

"Market cap size is critical for adoption of a store of value. It needs to be large enough to “fit” even very large amounts of fiat, ideally without affecting the market. Gold market cap is estimated at 7 trillion USD, which means that even the richest people can move all their assets into gold and not move the market. (At least one at a time. All of them at once will move the market big time).

Bitcoin market cap of about 70B USD is not large enough for even one of the richest people on the planet. This implies that if the market cap does not grow, Bitcoin is likely to fail as store of value."

[1] https://grisha.org/blog/2017/09/25/bitcoin-value-2/

They have thousands of object types.

I don't know what format they serialize to; native object, XML, json...

But here is an example tool that can do migrations via XML serialized data for Java. As an intermediary step in the XML serialization they create a document of XML that simply contains a version attribute alongside the schema. A similar approach would work for other serialization formats (json, native, etc).

https://dzone.com/articles/migrate-serialized-java

Edit:

I'll bet they use something like Across internally:
https://grisha.org/blog/2013/06/06/avro/

A recent September 2017 blog[1] estimated electricity mining costs to be ~$19k. (I don't know if bitcoin community has adjusted the hashing difficulty since September 2017 to maintain the 10-minute block rate.)

Are there realistic scenarios where the sustained value of bitcoin exceeds the mining costs?

What was the mining cost of 1 BTC in May 2010 when the famous request for 2 pizzas[2] for 10000 bitcoins was made?

[1] https://grisha.org/blog/2017/09/28/electricity-cost-of-1-bitcoin/

[2] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=137.0