ABEND dump #8

Welcome to the ABEND dump, the issue where I share the most interesting content I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching lately.

Want to check the previous issue? Read it here:

ABEND dump #7

Hercules Lemke Merscher ・ Dec 5 '23

#prometheus #drama #haskell #promcon

Write Like You Talk

Here's a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language.

Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.

If you simply manage to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers. And it's so easy to do: just don't let a sentence through unless it's the way you'd say it to a friend.

I love reading Paul Graham’s essays and this one was the essay that inspired me to write more casually, not stress too much with perfectness, and get something done.

8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production

Lately, I’ve been doing some Haskell for fun in my spare time and wrote about it. Ten years ago when I tried Haskell first time I also played a bit with OCaml. I found both languages amazing, but the terse syntax of Haskell and its way of dealing with side effects captivated me and I ignored OCaml since then. However, this blog post made me interested in trying it once more, as it looks like the tooling evolved a lot in the meantime.

@chshersh also shares his opinion on why he prefers OCaml nowadays.

Podcast recommendations

Speaking about Haskell and OCaml, I’ve listened to two episodes of two different podcasts recently that I think it’s worth recommending:

Both episodes talk about functional programming and the advantages and disadvantages of languages such as Haskell and OCaml, as well as some interesting use cases of these languages and their “unique” features.

How we execute PG major upgrades at GitLab, with zero downtime

Alexander Sosna gave this great presentation at PGConf about how major PostgreSQL upgrades are made at GitLab. Highly recommended if you’re dealing with databases at scale:

The slides can be seen here.

Pluto

I normally don’t share non-related programming stuff here, but I felt like recommending this anime called Pluto—there’s a mangá also if you’re more into reading.

I enjoyed reading the mangá and am now watching the anime on Netflix. It depicts a future where humans and highly advanced robots coexist, touching on many ethical and moral questions that permeate the AI world.

What a coincidence for me to pick it up right on the AI boom moment!

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Hercules Lemke Merscher