I’m a big fan of the book, Functional and Reactive Domain Modeling, and these are some of my notes (“CliffsNotes”) from the book, most of them coming from the first chapter.
Alvin Alexander | Java, Scala, Unix, Perl, Mac OS X
This “Can someone explain to me the benefits of IO?” Reddit post makes for some interesting functional programming and referential transparency reading.
When asked, “If you could give one tip for reaching heights in tech today, what would it be?”, this was the initial response from Jonas Bonér, creator of Akka:
- Work hard at minimizing your ego & attachment to identity
- Learn deliberately, seek out weaknesses & work hard at them
- Eliminate bad habits, replace them with good, one at a time
- Read a lot, foundational stuff, not just latest hyped thing
Probably the most important lesson I learned from aimlessly wandering around Alaska and the Lower 48 for five years is that if you treat complete strangers as long-lost brothers and sisters that you’re meeting for the first time, the world magically becomes a better place.
When I met my mom, Sister #2 and her husband in New Mexico in 2017, I brought my mom a bunch of junk food. The Twinkies didn’t make much of an impact on her, but when Sister #2 gave her a chocolate cupcake, my mom’s approximate words were, “OMG, this is the best thing I have ever eaten in my entire life.”
When I was in New Mexico a few years ago I met a woman who suggested that I needed to quit fighting a particular feeling I have been experiencing. She said that it was my heart chakra attempting to open, but each time it started to open, my Little Ego wouldn’t surrender, it held on to things as they are for dear life. She said that if I would just let go, I’d be on the path to loving all humans unconditionally.
On the drive home I was rudely cut off by a woman in a Mercedes, who was quite literally driving in my lane. As I moved out of her way and we passed each other, she glared at me like I was doing something ridiculously wrong by driving in my own lane. “Humans are a hard species to love,” I thought.
After that experience I decided to start counting all of the people I love or have loved, and if you include Neil Diamond – I threw him in there because my mom liked him so much – I got up to 49.
Somehow I have to find a way to get from 49 to several billion, including the glaring woman in the Mercedes. I think I’m going to have to work on my technique, or perhaps on my definition of “love.”
“I’m going to have to resect the colon.”
In late June, 2018, I had to have a colectomy surgery, which is also known as a colon resection. Here’s a diary of my experience.
I just ran across this chart from Morningstar that includes eight stocks with share repurchase programs. In general, I’m a fan of buying the stocks of companies that have share repurchase programs, but, you also have to look into the details of how and why they’re doing this, and you also have to understand the business behind each company. For instance, I’ve never heard of LB, so I looked them up, and I have no interest in investing in an apparel company, so immediately I scratch them off.
Other companies like CAH, MCK, and CVS (who suspended their share repurchase program to buy Aetna) are currently beaten down because of the threat that Amazon will enter their business space, so my first thought is that they’re buying back their stock because it’s at a significant discount. But again, you also have to look into their financials to see how they’re buying back their stock — is it from cash flow? Or are they borrowing money to buy their stock, and if so, how long will it take to pay off those loans?
While it’s old news (March, 2018), I’ve often wondered why Siri seems to be getting worse, and how/why Amazon and Google beat Apple to the market for Alexa-like assistants. MacRumors has this article where they report several of the problems related to Siri’s development. (Their article is based on an article written by The Information, which requires a subscription.)
I just happened to look out the window last night (Sunday, July 15, 2018) at the right time and saw the Moon and Venus hanging out together.
Looks like this airplane company might want to rethink how they place their slogan on their airplanes.
July 15, 2018: A little less than three weeks ago I had a type of surgery known as a colectomy, a procedure where a portion of the colon is surgically removed. The background of the story goes like this: Because of pain I was having whenever I tried to eat, I haven’t been able to eat solid foods since October, 2017. After eight months of hoping the problem would heal itself, I was finally forced to give up that hope when it became apparent that surgery was the only hope for a relatively normal life.
From this AirBnB article about using React Native: “JavaScript is an untyped language. The lack of type safety was both difficult to scale and became a point of contention for mobile engineers used to typed languages who may have otherwise been interested in learning React Native ... A side-effect of JavaScript being untyped is that refactoring was extremely difficult and error-prone.”
The 90/90 Rule: “The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.”
~ Tom Cargill
From this vox.com article: “When the 12 Thai boys who were trapped in a cave and were rescued one by one were first discovered by British divers last Monday, they were reportedly meditating ... Turns out that their coach, Ekapol Chanthawong, trained in meditation as a Buddhist monk for a decade before becoming a soccer coach.”
From this CNN article, “Older people with higher-than-average blood pressure have more markers of brain disease than their average-pressure peers, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Neurology ... researchers saw increased signs of areas of dead tissue caused by a block in the blood supply to the brain, when looking at postmortem tissue under a microscope. Autopsied brains also revealed that higher-than-average blood pressure is associated with one marker of Alzheimer's disease.”
Here’s An Illustrated Proof of the CAP Theorem, if you’re into things like consistency, availability, partition tolerance, and distributed systems.
I haven’t tried it yet, but if you’re interested in a Scala HTTP client, the people at softwaremill.com have sttp, and its docs are here.
Today a person did something that upset me. For a few moments it really bothered me and I thought, “Wow, this person is being a real jerk.” Then I remembered the phrase, “Every obnoxious act is a cry for help,” and I realized that this was this other person’s way of saying that they were hurting, and it helped me calm down in regards to them.
If you’re interested in the future of Scala, i.e., Scala 3, also known as Dotty, Martin Odersky recently shared a working draft document titled, Functional Typelevel Programming in Scala. See the “Files Changed” link on that page for the complete working document.
