For the first time since starting this weekly review, I skipped a week! Did you notice?

Anyway, I just finished “audio-reading” The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. It was a long one! At 17:30 hours net play time, it took me about 4 weeks to finish it at 1.25x rate, but it was worth it! I followed a recommendation by Jamie Todd Rubin, and enjoyed the excellent stories laying out the evolution of the digital age. I always thought that “historical subjects” can become interesting easily if told through stories of actual people involved, as opposed to dry facts and numbers. This book proved that point for me. As a common geek, I admit that it isn’t hard for me to find interest in stories about people ranging from Ada Lovelace through Sergey Brin, but I really think also non-geeks will find this book interesting.

The Weekly Review is a recurring (sort-of-)weekly summary, reviewing highlights from the last week(s).

Blog posts from the last two weeks

1. No blog is complete without a couple of year-end posts . I thought it’s a good opportunity to share my favorite podcasts and favorite blog feeds.
2. Two new posts in my SCons series – automating module discovery, and adding support for help and quiet flags.
3. My quick and dirty personal social analytics app.
4. The previous weekly review.

The best way to keep up with new posts is to follow the feed.

Web selections

An interesting post from Asana engineering blog, on building scalable data infrastructure at a startup. Another one on massive parallel testing. Although our production workloads in Day Job already require massive parallelization and distribution, our build chain and test suites don’t. I guess we’ll get there some day.

Haven’t found the time to watch it yet, but this tech talk on the future of app deployment at the airbnb nerds blog sounds interesting from the abstract…

Ever wondered about SSD defragmenting in Windows? Here’s a detailed analysis. tl;dr – Windows does defrag SSDs, and it’s smart about it.

Revert.io is a cloud backup service, providing backup of your data in other cloud services (e.g. Dropbox, Evernote, Tumblr, etc.). While it’s nice to have a backup to these other services, I’m not sure I see the value in cloud backup for cloud stuff in the cloud… They’re probably all on the same AWS infrastructure at the end of the day… I don’t think such a service can replace offline backups that I control (onsite and offsite) (yes, I intend to expand on this in the future), but I guess it’s better than nothing, for those who opt to do nothing.

Google released a couple of updates to Cardboard. Just add a smartphone, and you have a VR viewer! I can see how this is cool and fun, but I’m not really sure how useful and productive it can be. AR (augmented reality) though, it another thing! Since the underlying technologies have a lot in common, I do understand the value in improving VR and getting it to the hands of users.

Side project updates

Nothing…