What sticks in your head (2019) - musings on why it is easier to remember some stuff rather than other. John, who’s been linked on this blog many times, has a knack for remembering math, but doesn’t really remember programming topics that well. I’m opposite that. The “picking your memory battles” section was quite good from this point - if you know you don’t have a knack for something, don’t weight yourself with too many topics in that area - try to focus on the most important bits.

Amazon personalize (2019) - AWS has a personalisation service in their data toolbox, and it’s apparently the same one they use for Amazon.com. Hard to believe, but still, it’s a very high level system that is being offered and I’m curious how it’ll work in practice.

Practical polytheism (2019) - again, the topic of popular culture representations of history and culture. This time focusing on ancient polytheistic religions. My big takeaways from here were just how transactional this was, how many gods there were (thousands and millions even), and still how much of that is present in modern-day montheistic religions in tne end - suggesting something more fundamental is at play.

DNS crash course for developers (2019) - DNS is a globally distributed and federated key-value store used to map hierardical domains to “arbitrary information”, but usually IP addresses. The data is organised as records, which can be of several types, and this is a short overview of these.