Some of this, some of that

The days are long and my mind wanders.

• An update on Sunday’s service disruption

  Google’s engineering teams detected the issue within seconds, but diagnosis and correction took far longer than our target of a few minutes. Once alerted, engineering teams quickly identified the cause of the network congestion, but the same network congestion which was creating service degradation also slowed the engineering teams’ ability to restore the correct configurations, prolonging the outage. The Google teams were keenly aware that every minute which passed represented another minute of user impact, and brought on additional help to parallelize restoration efforts.

• Our not-so-magic journey scaling low latency, multi-region services on AWS

  CQRS is seriously good. By isolating out concerns and clearly defining which use cases you want to optimise for, it becomes possible to invest the effort in the most mission-critical services without having to drag along other functionality at the same time.

• CQRS

  The change that CQRS introduces is to split that conceptual model into separate models for update and display, which it refers to as Command and Query respectively following the vocabulary of CommandQuerySeparation. The rationale is that for many problems, particularly in more complicated domains, having the same conceptual model for commands and queries leads to a more complex model that does neither well.

• The Labor Movement’s Newest Warriors: Grad Students

  Hannah Kim and Natalia Piland are not your typical labor organizers. Kim, 23, has a bleached mullet, and when we met at a cafe near campus last Friday, she was wearing baggy track pants and chunky dad shoes. Piland, 29, was wearing all black, other than an iridescent fanny pack. Both of them are graduate students at the University of Chicago.

  It’s the final week of classes, but the two women have not been consumed with schoolwork. Instead, they’ve been busy organizing their peers to fight for better work conditions: On Monday, many UChicago graduate students participated in a three-day walkout, refusing to teach or grade papers.

  “What is a way for graduates to actually have power and to actually be able to push what we want our work place to look like?” Piland said. “The union is the only way that seems feasible.”

  These women, both members of Graduate Students United at UChicago, are among the new faces of unionization in America. They’re organizing what were once stable, middle class professions, which have seen wages and benefits erode precisely as positions opened up to women and minority candidates.

• Learning Chess at 40

  Denise Park, the director of research at the University of Texas’ Center for Vital Longevity, described what was happening to me in unsettling terms. “As you get older, you actually see clear degradation of the brain, even in healthy people. Your frontal cortex gets smaller, your hippocampus—the seat of the memory—shrinks.” My brain volume is atrophying annually, my cortical thickness dropping some 0.5 percent a year.

  Where my daughter’s brain was hungrily forming new neural connections, mine could probably have a used a few new ones. “You don’t want to be pruning synaptic connections, you want to be growing them,” Park told me. My daughter’s brain was trying to efficiently tame the chaos. “For older adults,” Park said, “there’s not nearly enough chaos.”

  Back at the board, there seemed to be plenty of chaos. For one, my daughter tended to gaily hum as she contemplated her moves. Strictly Verboten in a tournament setting, but I did not want to let her think it was affecting me—and it certainly wasn’t as bad as the frenetic trash talking of Washington Square Park chess hustlers. It was the sense of effortlessness that got to me. Where I would carefully ponder the board, she would sweep in with lightning moves. Where I would carefully stick to the scripts I had been taught—“a knight on the rim is dim”—she seemed to be making things up. After what seemed a particularly disastrous move, I would try to play coach for a moment, and ask: Are you sure that’s what you want to do? She would shrug. I would feel a momentary shiver of pity and frustration; “it’s not sticking,” I would think. And then she would deliver some punishing pin on the Queen, or a deft back rank attack I had somehow overlooked. When I made a move, she would often crow: “I knew you were going to do that.”

• Open Source Game Clones

  This site tries to gather open-source remakes of great old games in one place. If you think that something is missing from the list - please go to our GitHub repository and create an issue or even a pull request!

  Since all these projects are open-source you can help them and make this world a better place. Or at least you can play something to appreciate the effort people put in them.

• For Remote Communities In Scotland's Outer Hebrides, Mobile Libraries Are A Lifeline

  In Stornoway, the biggest town in Scotland's Outer Hebrides islands, a yellow van sits on a narrow, one-way street. The Gaelic word leabharlann is painted on the front, back and sides, with its English translation, "library," on the front and sides.

  Driver Iain Mackenzie has loaded his books in the van, organized his customers' orders and is preparing for his last run of the week on the island of Lewis and Harris. The 16-year-old van runs three days a week, covering more than 800 miles of rugged roads to deliver books to more than 800 residents.

• Strawberry farmers open homes for country's sole village of books

  Until recently, the village, just a few kilometres from the picturesque hill stations of Mahabaleshwar and Panchgani, was known for growing the best strawberries in the country. Now, it is a unique ‘village of books’ with 25 villagers having given up a part of their homes to set up open libraries.

  The idea was inspired by the Welsh village of Hay-on-Wye, which is informally known as the ‘town of books’, and has scores of second-hand and antiquarian bookstores. But the Maharashtra government has made the concept their own and expanded its scope. Its Marathi language department’s experts meticulously put together a collection of over 30,000 books organised under various genres. These were then distributed among the home libraries, as well as public places like temples and schools. Each home is allotted books pertaining to one genre and identified with street signs and wall paintings.