Ethan's Wiki Update #1
First update for the Wiki!
In these updates, I will go through what’s new in the Wiki from the past week, and maybe add a little bit of thoughts.
What’s New
Adding more Beej’s Guides to different pages
Added three links in three pages:
Previously, I already have the Beej's Guide to Network Concepts in the Computer Network page.
All are free in-depth guides, absolute work of love.
Personal Growth page: Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford Commencement Address
You will never know how the dots connect looking forward, e.g. you don’t know whether what you learn today will be helpful in the future. He talks about how he drop off and took a calligraphy class, which leads to nice typography in the first Macintosh.
The struggle when Steve Jobs is fired from Apple and how to face failures. Find what you love to do, keep looking, don't settle.
Time is limited, we all will die. Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition is important.
I thought this is in the Wiki until I realize it wasn’t! Highly recommend watching it if you never watched it before.
Two new additions to the Cybersecurity page:
How Mozilla Firefox release files are signed over 20 years. From a remote machine with the signature in a USB to Autograph (Mozilla's digital signature service).
Not exactly a tutorial/guide about cybersecurity, but I can’t find a better place to put it. The cybersecurity page has been a place that I put interesting stories about information security for a while, so it seems to fit.
It’s an interesting read on how one corner of the technology world changed over 20 years.
Cool write-up of a bug where you can get the email of any YouTube user
YouTube leak a Google account identifier, an old Google service API takes ID as input and return the email of the ID
Hacker news thread talks about the amount reward for finding this vulnerability ($10,000)
And because of this I also tidied the page a bit, to distinguish links for guides or opinions, from stories or write-ups of specific vulnerabilities.
Writing Page: Why Blog if Nobody Reads It?
Blogging forces clarity, structure thoughts and sharpen perspective.
It's for yourself. You did it because you saw something that needs to be written down, presented and shared.
Also read the HN thread, Simon Willison also mentioned that’s a good way to build credibility and foster useful relationships.
It’s a similar narrative and arguments for all the “why write?” articles I have collected, but I guess I need it again as I am starting this newsletter.
Software Design Page: Boring tech is mature, not old
Boring tech is well understood, perform in predictable and reliable way, with no surprised
A bit like the Squeeze the hell out of the system you have article shared in the same page before
One HN thread (this) say it right, though, it’s always tradeoff. And as an engineer, it’s to name those pros and cons. It’s not “this is better because it’s boring”.
Random
Someone over the internet finds the Fun page interesting. Indeed, I think so too! I just wish I have a better way to organise it. They are just so random. I highly recommend reading The Egg by Andy Weir. It takes 5 minutes to change how you think about the world and people around you. I think that is the best short novel story I ever discovered on the Internet.
I am also working on a new blog, about JavaScript arrays. It is a bit long, not sure when will I finish it. That’s it for the first update. Stay tuned!