Weekly Digest - Issue #13

Time for the last Weekly Digest in March! Today I have six juicy links and you can read a HashiCorp banking story, saving money by NOT going into the cloud, adding a screen to the laptop using Raspberry Pi, a nice story about a bug found during working on Crash Bandicoot and more!

Business and (side)project section

1. My Startup Banking Story

https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-startup-banking-story

An interesting and fun story about banking from the co-founder of HashiCorp. About creating a company banking account, having there a lot of cash and becoming a legend in the area - the HashiCorp guy.

2. How Ahrefs Saved US$400M in 3 Years by NOT Going to the Cloud

https://tech.ahrefs.com/how-ahrefs-saved-us-400m-in-3-years-by-not-going-to-the-cloud-8939dd930af8

The cloud has many advantages, but is it a solution for all problems? How costs of the cloud compared to the on-premise servers? Read how Ahrefs (SEO tool SaaS) did not burn a lot of money by not going into the cloud with their app!

Developer section

3. Herding elephants: Lessons learned from sharding Postgres at Notion

https://www.notion.so/blog/sharding-postgres-at-notion

You have probably heard of or even use Notion as it is pretty popular and has many users nowadays. But have you heard, as a developer, how they make the app work smoothly? They have sharded Postgres, which is not as common as it sees, and they are sharing their lessons learned!

4. Using a Raspberry Pi to add a second HDMI port to a laptop

https://pierre-couy.dev/tinkering/2023/03/turning-rpi-into-external-monitor-driver.html

Interesting writeup about using Raspberry PI as a way to add a second monitor to the notebook. It works pretty well and even putting monitor into sleep mode works!

5. 20 Things I’ve Learned in my 20 Years as a Software Engineer

https://www.simplethread.com/20-things-ive-learned-in-my-20-years-as-a-software-engineer/

Fellow developer shares his lesson learned after working 20 years as a Software Engineer. For example, as a programmer, you may tend to instantly go into writing code, but as number 4 points out - the best code is the code that has not been written! It is good to read a succh summary sometimes!