Hello from the only place I call home, Kerala!

I’m back home from my travels, hopefully to a couple of months of quiet before I get going again. I was so busy catching up on my usual tasks that this week’s newsletter is a day week late. Or, to paraphrase Rajinikanth, it may be late, but it is the latest.

But even Rajini might fall short of the stunts Apple pulled at WWDC24.

What’s Happening?

The biggest unveiling at WWDC24 was, of course, the Calculator app on iPad Apple Intelligence. I’m unsure what to make of it, but it would surely be an interesting year with more players in this broader AI space.

Simon Willison has a good summary of his thoughts on Apple Intelligence. An important point to note is that while Apple Intelligence will enable a lot, it will also increase the surface area for security vulnerabilities.

Speaking of vulnerabilities, if you had been on Twitter last week, you would have seen these MySpace-esque GitHub profiles from a CSS injection vulnerability. GitHub was quick to patch this as it could potentially be harmful.

Still, those cool profiles were cool for a day.

Here’s what I have for you from the past weeks:

  • Are You an NPC?: Free will that feels free is good enough for us.
  • What do Gen-Z software engineers really think?: The Pragmatic Engineer brings another interesting survey on Gen-Z software engineers. I’m on the older end of the Gen-Z spectrum and think the survey is accurate.
  • I wish you were a Kangaroo: This collection of excerpts from letters is a good starting point for this blog, “Letters of Note,” which has an excellent collection of letters forgotten.
  • The Attention Cottage: Alan Jacobs discusses the challenges of managing attention in today’s digital world. Having control of my attention has been something I have been striving towards and this article offers a good tool to think about it.
  • The End of Software: Understanding conflicting views and opinions is essential. But this is seriously a bad take. The cost of creating software has been low for a long time, which has resulted in new niche software products competing with giants in the game, like Salesforce, across different domains.
  • 50 things I know: I went from rejecting all advice, thinking I knew better, to cherry-picking advice and using it as a tool for thought. This article has a lot of cherries to pick.
  • How (some) good corporate engineering blogs are written: I enjoy reading engineering blogs of tech-first companies. As an engineer, it becomes evident to me when the post is written by a marketing team to boost SEO. This is the reason you only see good engineering posts on the front page of communities like Hacker News.
  • A Link Blog in the Year 2024: This newsletter has somehow evolved into a link blog. I did not even know the term when I resurrected the newsletter as a channel where I publish stuff I find interesting with commentary.
  • Faxes From the Far Side: The space race during the Cold War years has always interested me. This article gives insights into the Soviet Union’s mission to photograph the far side of the moon.
  • Making a bignum library for fun: A thing I love about most modern software engineering is how most work can be done on top of layers of abstraction. It is sometimes fun to rebuild these building blocks to learn how they are fundamental.
  • Group chats rule the world: I have also been significantly less social unless in closed groups among people offline. I’m not really an always online person. I tried hard not to be one, but apparently, group chats rule the world.
  • How I Found A 55-Year-Old Bug In The First Lunar Lander Game: This 55-year-old bug went unnoticed until Martin found it recently. I won’t spoil it, but it is pretty interesting.
  • Managing My Motivation as a Solo Dev: These techniques and tools aren’t exclusive to solo developers and can be applied by anyone doing any work.
  • India needs 20 million jobs per year: Migration is one reason why many issues with unemployment aren’t felt across the population. This is truer in Kerala, and a solution is urgently needed.
  • On dromomania: I have been traveling more since the COVID lockdowns and can confidently say that many of my pretenses about traveling are shattered. I am starting to appreciate staying put while also romanticizing travel.
  • I Will Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again: I saved the best for the last. My man woke up and chose violence. This is probably what most of us feel but can’t put into words. I can say that my man can articulate.

Hot off the Press

It has been almost two months since I wrote a new article. But this is one of my most popular articles, and I find it occasionally making rounds on Twitter and Reddit.

Read here: “A Comprehensive Guide to API Gateways, Kubernetes Gateways, and Service Meshes”

If you are new to these technologies, I promise you will find this article helpful.