Everyone should read "The AWK Programming Language". It's so short, with both the first and second editions floating around 200 pages in an A5 (could be off on that page size) form factor.
Aside from AWK being a handy language to know, understanding the ideas behind it from a language design and use case perspective can help open your eyes to new constructs and ideas.
> As the packet loss rate increases, HTTP/2 performs less and less well. At 2% packet loss (which is a terrible network quality, mind you), tests have proven that HTTP/1 users are usually better off - because they typically have up to six TCP connections to distribute lost packets over. This means for every lost packet the other connections can still continue.
Makes sense. One idea would be if the browser could detect packet loss (e.g. netstat -s and look for TCP retransmissions, and equivalent on other OSes) and open more sockets if there is.
Pretty cool. Any thoughts on adding a human-in-the-loop approval button on certain MCP calls?
I imagine sometimes I might want to require approval for certain tool calls all the time, whereas other times I might just want to add that to the prompt.
I've been working 20 hours a week at a major company for the last 7 years and I love it. Full health benefits.
> What kind of role are you in?
SRE/Programmer
> How did you make the part-time arrangement happen?
I accidentally fell into it when I went part time to do a masters degree to consider switching careers but then, when I decided I didn't want to pursue the other career, I just kept doing part time and my company was fine with it. I work Mondays (7 hours), Tuesdays (7 hours), and Wednesdays (6 hours) and then I have Thursdays through Sundays off. I get paid half of course but it's still a good salary (grateful to be a programmer!).
> What’s been the hardest part of working part-time in tech?
Sometimes it's easier for me to take calls on Thursdays or Fridays instead of pushing back on it (technically I could, but I don't want to jeopardize my part time status). This is fine as I just make up the time in the following week but it means that I can't easily treat Thursdays and Fridays exactly like a weekend as far as scheduling trips, etc.
> Are there specific companies or setups that are more open to part-time roles?
I did it at a huge company so I think it's possible anywhere but I already had a great reputation and my company really wanted to keep me, and I think it would be harder to do without having a great reputation. I get the impression that companies generally don't like doing this because of the possible contagion effect of other workers wanting to do the same, so I generally don't talk about it much at work.
> Any tips, advice, or experiences you can share would be super helpful!
Four days a week part time is much more do-able than three days a week. Don't limit yourself just to companies/jobs that explicitly advertise part time work, though those certainly also make sense to apply to, but just make part time a key part of the negotiation process. Consider emphasizing flexibility.
1. A classic book is The Mythical Man-Month and it discusses a surgical team approach that I think is interesting where there are lead surgeons and the rest of the team is there to support them.
2. Programmer Anarchy by Fred George on YouTube is an interesting idea.
MMM is a good book, but I like to suggest Weinberg's The Psychology of Computer Programming as another contemporary (to it) take that discusses both how to examine what's happening in teams (effective or not) and what was observed in some teams (effective and not). Like MMM, it received an update later on. Weinberg left his original text essentially intact (I think light changes to address errors in the printing, not changes to what was written though) and added commentary to each chapter instead of editorializing them directly.
With all that, might want some good automatic anomaly detection. While at IBM's Watson lab, I worked out something new, gave an invited talk on the work at the NASDAQ server farm, and published it.
With a lot of monitoring someone might be interested.
I rely on a heuristic approach which is to track the rate of change in key metrics like swap usage, disk I/O, and memory pressure over time. The idea is to calculate these rates at regular intervals and use moving averages to smooth out short-term fluctuations.
By observing trends rather than just static value ( a data point at specific time) you can get a better sense of whether your system is underutilizing or overutilizing swap space. For instance, if swap usage rates are consistently low but memory is under pressure, you might have vm.swappiness set too low. Conversely, if swap I/O is high, it could indicate that swappiness is too high.
This is a poor man’s approach, and there are definitely more sophisticated ways to handle this task, but it’s a quick solution if you just need to get some basic insights without too much work.
nekoweb is another one: https://nekoweb.org/explore?page=1&sort=lastupd&by=tag&q=