The Science of the Job Search, Part VII: You Only Need 50% of Job “Requirements” – is a nice article in the series, with a few interesting numbers. The one that stands out the most is:
You’re as likely to get a job interview meeting 50% of job requirements as meeting 90% of them.
This sounds about right. And it also explains how the recruiting is still around, with all those ridiculous requirements in every other vacancy.
Slashdot is running a story, which is both insightful and hilarious:
Research published in a major medical journal concludes that a parachute is no more effective than an empty backpack at protecting you from harm if you have to jump from an aircraft. But before you leap to any rash conclusions, you had better hear the whole story. The gold standard for medical research is a study that randomly assigns volunteers to try an intervention or to go without one and be part of a control group. For some reason, nobody has ever done a randomized controlled trial of parachutes. In fact, medical researchers often use the parachute example when they argue they don’t need to do a study because they’re so sure they already know something works. Cardiologist Robert Yeh, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and attending physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, got a wicked idea one day. He and his colleagues would actually attempt the parachute study to make a few choice points about the potential pitfalls of research shortcuts.
They started by talking to their seatmates on airliners. […] In all, 23 people agreed to be randomly given either a backpack or a parachute and then to jump from a biplane on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts or from a helicopter in Michigan. Relying on two locations and only two kinds of aircraft gave the researchers quite a skewed sample. But this sort of problem crops up frequently in studies, which was part of the point Yeh and his team were trying to make. Still, photos taken during the experiment show the volunteers were only too happy to take part. The drop in the study was about 2 feet total, because the biplane and helicopter were parked. Nobody suffered any injuries. Surprise, surprise. So it’s technically true that parachutes offered no better protection for these jumpers than the backpacks.
The evolution of technology always amazes me. Even more so, when it can so clearly be seen within the every day life, such as household items, day-to-day activities, or, like in this particular case, movies.
Well done, Pixar! Keep it up!
There are not many people who I trust on the subject of API design like I do Phil Sturgeon. He has been a prominent speaker both online and at numerous conferences, covering a variety of problems, solutions, and approaches in the API design domain.
In one of his recent blog posts, he shared a diagram (see above) which provides a clear illustration on which API paradigm – REST, GraphQL, or RPC – one should pick for a web application, based on a variety of criteria.
I think this is probably the simplest of all the explanations I’ve seen around.
Paul Hammant has a quick and simple blog post illustrating the request-response sequence in the web application on a serverless infrastructure. I find it quite useful as a reference, when explaining serverless to people who are considering it for the first time.
This stuff and the abandonment of names:ports in the config is a key advance for our industry. It is like a limiting Unix problem has been overcome. While it is still is impossible for two processes on one server to listen on the same port (say port 443), it is now not important as we have a mechanism for efficiently stitching together components (functions) of an application together via the simplest thing – a name. A name that is totally open for my naming creativity (ports were restricted if they were numbered below 1024 and also tied to specific purposes) . We’re also relieved of the problem of having to think of processes now, and whether they’ve crashed and won’t be receiving requests any more. Here’s a really great, but rambling, rant on a bunch of related topics by Smash Company that you should read too as it touches on some of the same things but goes much broader.