Today I enjoyed reading You can’t tell people anything.
Author Archives: jj5
The End of OS X
Today I read The End of OS X. I particularly liked the bit about the Unix philosophy:
- Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new “features”.
- Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don’t clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don’t insist on interactive input.
- Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don’t hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
- Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you’ve finished using them.
MySQL Table Locking Issues
Today reading about MySQL Table Locking Issues. Of particular interest were the HIGH_PRIORITY and SQL_BUFFER_RESULT SELECT Statement options.
PHP Operator Precedence
Today I had cause to read about Operator Precedence in PHP. I think I will consider availing myself of the ‘and’ and ‘or’ keywords in future, I haven’t used them myself, although I have seen them before.
Scaling to 100k Users
Today on r/programming was an article Scaling to 100k Users which discusses the phases you go through as you grow.
Plain JavaScript can do a lot!
Today I saw on r/programming a post by Julia Evans titled A little bit of plain JavaScript can do a lot. She discusses some of JavaScript’s more powerful contemporary features.
PHP clearstatcache()
It’s very important to remember that PHP caches results of file-system functions. Details are here.
I’m trying to just literally never argue with people
I’m reading this great interview with Marc Andreessen in which he says:
I’ve really been trying hard to spend less time actually arguing with anybody. Because people really don’t want to change their mind. And so I’m trying to just literally never argue with people.
…I thought that was worth making a note of. I think I’m going to take that on board.
How much does it cost to run a blog?
Today I read How Much Does It Cost To Run This Blog?. The bottom line was:
| Item | Monthly Cost |
| Domain registration | £0.49 ($0.62) |
| VPS hosting | £12.00 ($15.23) |
| DNS hosting | £1.54 ($1.95) |
| WP Rocket plugin | £0.79 ($1.00) |
| ShortPixel credits | £0.65 ($0.83) |
| Updraftplus SFTP plugin | £0.79 ($1.00) |
| Yoast SEO plugin | £8.90 ($11.30) |
| Total: | £25.16 ($31.93) |
Feynman technique
Today (while reading this) I stumbled upon the Feynman technique.
Basically with the Feynman technique you just write down everything that you know about a concept/subject until you can see where your knowledge is shaky. It’s a problem solving tool.