ABEND dump #7
Haskell, OpenAI drama, chasing performance, five nines, and PromCon 2023
Hello again. It’s been a while 😅
The ABEND dump is 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 #6
One of the reasons it took me so long to write a new ABEND dump post was that I was revisiting a language that I enjoy a lot, Haskell. The language itself has its advantages and disadvantages, like any other, but not many people are exposed to it or have a bad impression because of random comments and jokes and don’t even try it, so I may write about Haskell for beginners—I’m not a Haskell pro myself and writing could solidify some concepts in my mind.
Effective Haskell
The Pragmatic Bookshelf released this new book, Effective Haskell. It has a bunch of exercises to dabble with the language. Though The Learn You A Haskell and Real World Haskell are closer to my heart, they are a bit old already, but still valid as a reference. The Effective Haskell from Rebecca Skinner has up-to-date examples and some nice extras, such as the chapters Building Efficient Programs and Programming with Types.
The author, Rebecca Skinner, is very approachable on Twitter and GitHub if you need to discuss anything.
The OpenAPI drama
Gergely from The Pragmatic Engineer wrote an article covering all the OpenAI drama.
Fast Tokenizers with StringScanner
Tenderlove has such great didactic! I usually learn a ton by reading his posts. In this article, he goes through writing a basic lexer and improving its performance with simple but powerful techniques.
Five nines: chasing the dream?
Is 99.999 percent availability ever a practical or financially viable possibility? Andrew Hiles explores the question.
PromCon 2023
This year the PromCon happened in Berlin and I could not miss it. Now that the videos are available on YouTube I’m adding below the ones that caught my attention.
Zero-code application metrics with eBPF and Prometheus
Having the possibility to instrument an application without even touching the application code is mind-blowing. Now even decades-old applications can be instrumented:
Finding useless and resource-hungry Prometheus metrics
Taming the Tsunami: Low Latency Ingestion of Push-Based Metrics in Prometheus
See you on the next one ✌️