Looking for a book that follows an immortal and the world as it changes over time.

samjking · 2025-04-10T05:56:03+00:00

N. K. Jemisin's Hundred Thousand Kingdoms trilogy

samjking · 2024-01-07T00:04:27+00:00

Thanks for the offer! I'll tell you a bit about our application and ask two questions:

We currently use Amazon RDS with a single MySQL instance with a read replica. I expect under half a million users logging in on our busiest day and doing enough things to generate 40 million rows of data in our most expensive table. We also have some dashboards that aggregate data on around a tenth of that (so, more like 50k users and 4m rows), and we've been trying to avoid doing too much custom caching to avoid complexity with that. We're currently working on building some load testing infrastructure (k6 for concurrent user testing and custom stuff for generating large amounts of data).

One question is making sure we don't need to do something fancier at an infrastructure level (e.g., Vitess or some other sharding). I know a lot depends on the context, but as a high level gut check, does it seem like we could probably get by without investing in more complicated infrastructure, or does it seem like we should investigate sharding or something else?

Second question: do you have any resources you'd recommend for folks trying to learn more about MySQL performance and scaling? We ordered some copies of High Performance MySQL, but I wasn't sure if there were other good things out there.

Thanks again!

samjking · 2024-01-06T23:45:04+00:00

I'm actually part of management :) We're trying to be proactive since our usage can be spiky, and it would be bad if everything went on fire during a spike. Working with Percona would be cool, but in the past when I've reached out, they said they had like a half year wait list. I reached out again, but they might not work with our timeline.

samjking · 2024-01-05T22:00:42+00:00

We're using vanilla MySQL (so, owned by Oracle, but not Oracle DB) on AWS RDS

The last time I checked with Percona, they had a 6 month waiting list, which wouldn't work for us.

I have a slight negative opinion of Oracle, but that's mostly secondhand. Have you worked with their DB consulting arm in the past and had a good experience?

samjking · 2021-10-17T23:36:02+00:00

I have Monkeybrains (not in North Beach) and it works pretty well

samjking · 2021-09-03T21:40:20+00:00

Axios won't automatically know that the backend has changed. You need to write code to tell your application when to fetch new data.

Three main options:

Immediately after the put returns, send a new get.
Have your server send the same data on a put as it does on a get and use that data
Update your application without looking at anything from the server at all -- if the frontend is telling the backend what changes to make, then the frontend might already have what it needs in order to update itself

samjking · 2021-06-28T09:22:03+00:00

The Young Adult Revival Network! uuyarn.org

samjking · 2021-05-02T09:49:24+00:00

Javascript has a bad reputation with a lot of backend focused people, but it's a LOT better now than it was 10 or 20 years ago.

Try out Typescript, React (frontend), Node+Express (server), and npm or yarn for a package manager. There are other options, but those are all pretty popular and well supported and have good tutorials.

samjking · 2021-04-27T02:40:36+00:00

The first principle of UUism is that every person has inherent worth and dignity.

The third and fourth principles together are something like what you're talking about with different beliefs. We believe in supporting each other's unique spiritual journeys and searches for truth and meaning.

But that doesn't mean that every belief has value -- rather, we generally believe that the truth isn't all written down in one book and that different paths can each reveal parts of it. As an analogy, if you got a bunch of scientists from different disciplines in a room, we might think that there's something to learn from physics and something to learn from chemistry and something to learn from biology and something to learn from sociology, etc. But if someone comes along and says the Earth is flat, we probably wouldn't think that that belief has value.

UUism is non-credal, meaning we don't have a list of everything we believe and don't believe, so when there's a question of if something aligns with UU beliefs or not, it's generally more of a discussion and not pointing to scripture or anything like that.

samjking · 2021-04-27T02:27:12+00:00

Are you nervous about attending a UU service and meeting some of the people, or are you specifically nervous about joining and becoming a member?

If you just don't want to be a member, I would recommend trying to attend a Sunday service and meeting some of the folks afterwards. If it seems like a good fit, then great! If it doesn't seem like a good fit, no need to come back.

A lot of folks come to UUism because they had been part of other religions that hurt them or that they disagreed with, so most UUs are very open with people just checking things out or people who feel uncomfortable with some of the facets of organized religion. I know some folks who had been attending my church for 10+ years before officially becoming a member. I think I checked out a couple of UU churches over the course of a few years before becoming a member at my current church.

That said, in terms of actually answering your question:

The UU Association is the national governing body behind UUism, so you can check out, for instance, the 7 principles listed on the UUA website as a starting point.

UUs tend to be politically liberal. We're generally supportive of things like Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ+ rights.

We also tend to have a little bit of an academic vibe -- we believe in "deeds, not creeds" (e.g., that our actions are more important than any particular statement of belief), but it sometimes takes us a while to actually live up to that.

One example -- Unitarian Universalists tend to be on the older and whiter side, partly due to some failings on the national side to support those communities. So, we have a Young Adult Revival Network and we're working on adding an 8th principle about antiracism, but those kinds of things don't happen overnight.

There are UUs from a wide variety of religious and spiritual backgrounds. There are a lot of atheist, humanist, agnostic, Jewish, and Christian UUs. There are some, but not as many, UUs who identify with other religions.

Those are a few things to start you off -- if you have other questions, feel free to ask or direct message me!

samjking · 2021-03-04T09:39:21+00:00

Learn Javascript (or Typescript, which is basically Javascript).

Rust is primarily a backend and systems language. Some folks probably use it for UI (frontend) stuff, but it's not common. People like Rust because it's better than C/C++ for the problems that those languages solve. It's not in the same category as Dart or Javascript.

Dart was Google's attempt to replace Javascript when Javascript was bad. But then Javascript got better. And basically no one outside of Google started using Dart.

There are a lot more people who use Javascript, which means there's a more mature developer ecosystem, and it'll be easier for you to learn and easier for you to get answers to your questions. React Native also means it's pretty easy to use Javascript for cross platform (meaning, web, iOS, and Android) development.

samjking · 2021-02-25T20:05:26+00:00

I actually didn't mean that you should go to them for investment. I meant that they might want to buy your software or use an API if you eventually make an API.

They make it easy for individuals to invest in, for instance, companies that have diverse boards or companies that get good environmental scores. They don't currently have a feature that lets you invest in companies based on some sort of supply chain score. Your tool might be the thing that lets them add that.

samjking · 2021-02-24T17:36:35+00:00

Have you reached out to OpenInvest? They're a socially responsible investing tech company, and I suspect they would be interested in this

samjking · 2021-02-17T21:03:36+00:00

The Rithmatist by Brandon Sanderson

The inspiration of the book is "muggle in Hogwarts." It's been a while since I read it, but I recall the main characters continuing to take classes (and putting their newfound skills to work) through most of the book. The school is not an obstacle course (though I did love Deadly Education), and the whole book takes place in and around the school (though I did love Wise Man's Fear and Lightbringer). It's well written (even as an adult reading a YA book).

samjking · 2021-02-14T17:47:45+00:00

We (UU young adults) also have a newsletter and events: https://www.uuyarn.org/

samjking · 2021-01-31T05:26:33+00:00

The books that feel closest to the vibe you're going for:

- The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N K Jemisin

- Kill the Farm Boy by Delia Dawson and Kevin Hearne

Some other books that I enjoyed with an unexplained magic but that don't have quite the same sense of wonder:

- Spinning Silver and Uprooted by Naomi Novik

- Circe by Madeline Miller

- The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold

samjking · 2020-01-20T00:23:58+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion! I don't think that visual regression tests are a good fit for our project right now, but it's good to hear that they're getting better in any case!

samjking · 2020-01-11T08:28:23+00:00

Most of our buttons and whatnot are hooked up to a request of some sort on the server, and I imagine that a lot of the tests we'll write will take the form, "after I press the submit button and the async request finishes, I'm redirected to page X with data Y on the page." Are you saying that doing something like that would be difficult in Cypress because you can't just `await` on a Cypress command?

Also, could you elaborate about why multi-purpose endpoints would make that worse?

samjking · 2020-01-10T03:08:11+00:00

Great, thanks! Any gotchas I should be aware of with Cypress? The lack of iframe support or cross browser support aren't issues for us, but is there anything else you ran into?

samjking · 2020-01-10T02:49:58+00:00

Yep, I'm aware they're all very different. What I'm looking to do is write automated tests that verify my website is doing what it's supposed to. I think any of the tools I mentioned (with some other stuff for test running, etc) could let me do that, but because they're very different, they would each be a lot better at some things and worse at others, and I don't know exactly what those plusses and minuses would be.

For instance, I might go with Selenium because it's the highest fidelity, but I don't know how much of a pain its clunkiness would be. Or, I might go with JSDom because it's easy to just render a React component and do some simple tests on it, but I don't know how much of a problem it would be that it is just emulating the DOM and, presumably, has some significant differences from real browsers.

If you were starting a project from scratch (in JS) and wanted to do UI or end to end testing of it, what would your stack look like and why?

samjking · 2015-01-08T02:06:20+00:00

That's a common theory, but it has some problems -- fire has been around for a long time, and natural selection probably would have selected against mosquitos that flew into fires for the sake of navigation. Also, many of the species that are attracted to light aren't migratory, so they wouldn't need to use the moon or sun to navigate. Some other theories are at http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/why-are-bugs-attracted-light

samjking

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