Recent content in Recent Posts on Beng Tan
TL;DR: This is the last issue of Interesting Things. Read on. Hi, When I started Interesting Things, I was in the middle of a year-long sabbatical from work. Covid-induced, sure, but it was an opportunity to take a break, do some random things, scratch an itch or two, and try new stuff. One of which was writing my own accounting software (!). Another was a newsletter. A few months after starting…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Forgetting about the problem of memory — There is a notion that it is acceptable for a program to crash if memory is exhausted. This bothers me. ( hn ) A little fixed point math for embedded audio — That, and a look-up table, reduced…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Why you should include debugging in the interview process — Technical interviews should stop over-indexing on coding ability alone. ( hn ) My Wife’s Facebook got Hacked — The method by which they gained access is new to me. ( hn…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Five Koans of Software Architecture — Random advice I find myself repeating a lot. ( hn ) How Cryptocurrency Gave Birth to the Ransomware Epidemic — Ransomware gangs are targeting everyone from large and small businesses and government…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Agile and the Long Crisis of Software — What is Agile? And where does it come from? ( hn ) Spreadsheets Are Hot—and Cranking Out Complex Code — The venerable (and super dull) piece of officeware is getting reinvented as a tool for…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech To Make Better Software, Do What Artists Do — Writing software involves a kind of illegible creativity, a quality we usually associate with art. ( hn ) How we secure Monzo’s banking platform — Our security principles and how they work…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech A Year of BonsaiDb: A retrospective and looking to the future — Aiming to be the most developer-friendly Rust database with a unique feature set geared at solving many common data problems. ( hn ) Rust is minimalist — I realize that,…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Write once, store anywhere: Extensible file systems for Go — Use this new file system pattern in your next app for better quality code and less wasted effort. ( hn ) Sorry, but due to the high cost of energy we will shutdown your…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Tidbyt: a review — A tabletop LED display for quiet data. I think it’s pretty cool. ( hn ) Tech Talks Don’t Have to be Boring — Most people think these simple rules are impractical and don’t follow them. Result? Bo-ring! ( hn )…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech If it’s not a number, what is it? Demystifying NaN for the working programmer. — There are few things that can trip up even experienced programmers more easily than floating-point arithmetic. ( hn ) Problems with Signal messenger app…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech For Linux Enthusiasts Especially, The Steam Deck Is An Incredible & Fun Device — A developer mode effectively turns it into a general Linux handheld able to load your Linux distribution of choice. ( hn ) A brief tour of the Steam…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Are You Still Using Real Data to Train Your AI? — Synthetic data can make AI systems better and maybe even more ethical. ( hn ) What Is Rust’s Hole Purpose? — An oft-cited selling point is that Rust offers safety. ( hn ) AI…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech An optimization story (Jan 2022) — I made a physics simulation 4x faster by exercising my best NumPy skills, and 50x faster after rewriting in Rust. ( hn ) An Introduction to Deno: Is It Better than Node.js? — Learn about the key…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech EXIF metadata privacy: A picture is worth a thousand data points (Oct 2021) — Are the pictures you share online posing a threat to your privacy? Precision In Technical Discussions — Some things that help me get precise. ( hn ) Best…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Stop Storing Secrets In Environment Variables! — Any overly-verbose information disclosure vulnerability in a dependency could smash the sand castle. ( hn ) Not so smart contracts — Immutability and the lack of human interaction is a…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Reflexivity in Tech Returns: Talent Chasing Money Chasing Talent — This recursive model is an important part of what’s going on in the tech sector. ( hn ) Going to Go — I’ve been thinking about what to use for rebuilding a set of…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Fantastic Symbols and Where to Find Them - Part 1 — How profillers and debuggers translate machine addresses to human-readable symbolic names. ( hn ) A breakdown of a DKIM replay attack — A CTO explains a DKIM replay attack and how you…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Letting Go of Random — What is a good use of random and what is not? ( hn ) Memory leaks: the forgotten side of web performance — If a web app leaks 5 MB on every interaction, but it still works and nobody notices, then does it matter?…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #2022 2022 Predictions — How do I become a better decision maker? ( hn ) Looking Forward: Some Predictions for 2022 — As we approach the end of the year, let’s look ahead at some trends and predictions for 2022. ( hn ) 2021 in review —…
Happy New Year! This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy holiday reading! #tech The importance of Correctness in concurrent algorithms — Researchers prefer to spend some time writing a formal proof of correctness. In the software industry the mindset is nearly opposite. ( hn ) “Cooperation Was…
Merry Christmas! This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy holiday reading! #tech How Long Do Disk Drives Last? — This reported has been updated since it was originally published in 2013 to provide the latest information and statistics. ( hn ) The container throttling problem — Most CPU bound…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Virtual Femto Photography — In most of Computer Graphics, light speed is assumed to be infinite. What happens when we remove this assumption? ( hn ) How to criticize code — Similar to learning how to edit other’s essays, you must learn…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Jumping The Air Gap: 15 years of nation-state effort [pdf] — How malware frameworks targeting air-gapped networks operate and their most important tactics, techniques and procedures. ( hn ) A Normie’s Guide to Becoming a Crypto Person…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science and society. Happy reading! #tech Snake in a Block — How I Ran Snake on Ethereum — Technical details on how to minimize the gas needed to run the game and fit it all within the block. ( hn ) On “Powered by AI / ML” marketing — The vast majority of prominent…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and random stuff. Happy reading! #tech Sociotechnical Lenses into Software Systems (Oct 2021) — People are constantly changing software, and those people almost certainly have different short and long-term goals, contexts, and pressures. ( hn ) How Many Titles…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and random stuff. Happy reading! #tech Object-Oriented Programming — The Trillion Dollar Disaster — Why it’s time to move on from OOP. ( hn ) The Unfulfilled Promise of Serverless — Say what you will about serverless, it’s failed to live up to its promise and…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and random stuff. Happy reading! #tech Upgrading an Amiga 500 for today (Sept 2021) — I bought one on eBay and decided to upgrade it with modern parts. ( hn ) How Two Interns Are Helping Secure Millions of Lines of Code — How do we find security vulnerabilities…
In a previous post, I looked at the tracking links of three major email newsletter providers and deconstructed two of them. The third, Substack/Mailgun, stubbornly resisted deciphering. Until now. After the previous post, a reddit user helped work it out . A tracking link like this: http://email.substack1.exponentialview.co/c/eJxdkEuOhCAQhk_TLI1VIOqCxWz6GoZ…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and random stuff. Happy reading! #tech A comprehensive guide to go generate — The go generate command has been introduced all the way back in Go 1.4, and since then has been widely used in the Go ecosystem. ( hn ) Sayonara, C++, and hello to Rust! — As a…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and random stuff. Happy reading! #tech Reflections on software development from anywhere on an iPad — Here’s what I’ve learned over the months and how my baremetal homelab in the sky is setup. ( hn ) TAO: Facebook’s Distributed Data Store for the Social Graph —…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and random stuff. Happy reading! #tech Hey linker, can you spare a meg? — Would you patch your linker to get an extra megabyte of memory? These people did. It made sense for them. ( hn ) A complete guide to code reviews — Why the most successful teams use code…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and random stuff. Another busy week. Happy reading! #tech Why We Crave Software With Style Over “Branding” — Modern software’s uniformity has fueled a craving for more interesting, opinionated tools. ( hn ) ‘date -d’ vs. ‘date -s’, and…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and random stuff. Happy reading! #tech Analyzing the Mario Themed Malware — A deep dive into analysis of a malware spread through Facebook ads. ( hn ) Adventures in Looping — [haskell] If only there was some way to exit from a forever loop. ( hn ) The Javascript…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and stuff. Happy reading! #tech Be careful what you copy: Invisibly inserting usernames into text with Zero-Width Characters — Watermarking text with invisible non-printing characters. ( hn ) SRE deep dive into Linux Page Cache — I believe that the following…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and stuff. This week has also been busy but I’m also mixing up how I do things and making some adjustments to the content. Less stories, more quality. Better signal-to-noise ratio. Or so I hope. Let’s give it a couple of weeks or so for things to…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and stuff. Been crazy busy this week so I didn’t get through as much as I normally do. But I have been thinking about cutting down a bit anyway as it makes this newsletter more digestible. Maybe this is a sign of things to come. Anyway, happy reading! #tech…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and stuff. Happy reading! #tech Pining For A De-Googled Smartphone — The key to happiness is low expectations. ( hn ) I Wish My Relational Database Tables Were Narrower — Narrower tables are generally better than wider tables in a relational database management…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and stuff. Happy reading! #tech Life before Unicode — Unicode added a lot of complexity to string handling but the alternatives are far worse. 7 Reasons Why I use Lenovo Thinkpad Laptops (for Linux) — I’m just a very happy user of this brand over the years on…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and stuff. Happy reading! #tech Keeping Up — The more you know, the more you will realize you don’t know. How will you learn it all? You won’t. How To Thrive As An Average Programmer — I go to bed happy to have a job that I love. It’s a comparatively good life. I…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and stuff. Happy reading! #tech Decoding AVIF: Deep dive with cats and imgproxy — It is time to talk seriously about AVIF, what makes it different, and how to start using it today. ( hn ) Three fundamental flaws of SIMD — The promise of increased data processing…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and stuff. Here is a bunch of stories for this week. Space them out and enjoy them slowly. Don’t read all in one sitting. 😁 I hope you continue to like the content. Otherwise, no worries, the escape hatch is to [unsubscribe]({{ unsubscribe_url }}). Happy…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and stuff. Here’s some stories to keep you occupied throughout the week. Don’t read it all in one sitting. 😁 I hope you continue to like the content. Otherwise, no worries, the escape hatch is to [unsubscribe]({{ unsubscribe_url }}). Happy reading!…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, work, biz, science, life and stuff. Here’s some stories to keep you occupied throughout the week. Don’t read it all in one sitting. 😁 I hope you continue to like the content. Otherwise, no worries, the escape hatch is to [unsubscribe]({{ unsubscribe_url }}). Happy reading!…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, indie biz, science, and related fields. Here’s some stories to keep you occupied throughout the week. Space it out and only read what you find interesting. Don’t do it all in one sitting. 😁 I hope you continue to like the content. Otherwise, no worries, there is the option…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, indie biz, science, and related fields. There’s a lot of stuff here (as usual). Read what you find interesting and ignore the rest. 😆 I hope you continue to like the content. Otherwise, no worries, there is the option to [unsubscribe]({{ unsubscribe_url }}). Happy reading! #tech…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, indie biz, science, and related fields. Just read what you find interesting and ignore the rest. 😆 I hope you continue to like the content. Otherwise, no worries, there is the option to [unsubscribe]({{ unsubscribe_url }}). Happy reading! #meta I’d like to make a request please.…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, indie biz, science, and related fields. Just read what you like and ignore the rest. 😆 I hope you continue to find the stories interesting. If you don’t, no worries, you can always [unsubscribe]({{ unsubscribe_url }}). Happy reading! #tech A First Look Into Generative Art — My…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, indie biz, science, and related fields. There’s less stories (40) than usual this week (50-ish). I was busy with other things. But this might be the new normal because (a) I’m working on a new project, and (b) I still hear sometimes that there are too many stories. 😆 (Tip:…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, indie biz, science, and related fields. There are a lot of new subscribers this week. A very warm welcome to you all. I hope you like what you’ve found here. I’m experimenting a bit with the content and presentation. There might be some fluctuations over the next few weeks…
Hi, This is Beng Tan and welcome to Interesting Things , a curation of interesting stories and links from tech, indie biz, science, and related fields. I hope you find the following stories interesting. If you don’t, it’s my fault, not yours. But you can [unsubscribe]({{ unsubscribe_url }}) and I won’t bother you again. Happy reading! #tech Metastable Failures in Distributed…