Jason Tarasovic

I read a thread on X this morning that "you can be a coder and not be good at math." While true, I can also be a truck driver and have poor night vision. I'm going to be professionally hobbled, though. I reflect on the fields I've worked in across the last 30 years, and if all I did was make pretty websites and put data to and from databases, sure, I could get by on natural language comprehension alone. But the market is oversaturated with "coders" of that sort, and if you want to differentiate yourself, better than being able to talk and demonstrate SOLID, get good at higher order mathematics. If you don't have to be good at math, really, it's because people laid the ground for you by abstracting most of those concepts away from you. And I'm glad the field is open enough that there's a space for coders from all walks of life. I would still argue, though, that mathematics are the MOST vital component of programming. One of my first exercises in coding once I got beyond BASIC and into C or Turbo Pascal on my original CP/M machine was drawing a line using only integers. I had to go to my public library (there was no meaningful Internet then) as a child coder to research Bresenham's line algorithm because, well, try drawing a line on an old 8-bit computer with limited graphics using floating point and see what happens. In many ways, coding helped me understand concepts I struggled with in pre-algebra, algebra, and geometry. It's why I did well at Science Olympiads with computers. Again, sure, you can get by, but I'd argue you'll never really be challenged.

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Today and tomorrow, you can get ScyllaDB in Action for 50% off at Manning! http://mng.bz/46Jw Every chapter is now available (physical copies coming soon!), and you'll get to learn about cool things like: * Tablets: the biggest feature in the brand new Scylla 6.0 * Monitoring and performing operations on ScyllaDB * Resolving the rare production incident * Designing applications for Scylla * How Scylla implements reads and writes * Extracting data into a data warehouse 50% off at Manning! http://mng.bz/46Jw But of course, don't stop there! Check out my friends Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop's great book on Writing for Developers: Blogs that Get Read https://mng.bz/eoOP. They analyze some super interesting blogs and show what makes them effective, helping you integrate those into your writing. Manning Publications Co. ScyllaDB

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If you are working with Docker... I highly recommend looking at the Slim toolkit. https://lnkd.in/gX_Gb9Kf Why? Slim allows developers to inspect, optimize, and debug their containers using its xray, lint, build, debug, run, images, merge, registry, vulnerability (and other) commands. It simplifies and improves your developer experience building, customizing and using containers. It makes your containers better, smaller and more secure while providing advanced visibility and improved usability working with the original and minified containers. Don't change anything in your container image; minify it by up to 30x to make it secure, too! Optimizing images isn't the only thing it can do, though. It can also help you understand and author better container images. Keep doing what you are doing. No need to change anything. Use the base image you want. Use the package manager you want. Don't worry about hand-optimizing your Dockerfile. You shouldn't have to throw away your tools and your workflow to have small container images. Node.js application images: from ubuntu:14.04 - 432MB => 14MB (minified by 30.85X) from debian:jessie - 406MB => 25.1MB (minified by 16.21X) from node:alpine - 66.7MB => 34.7MB (minified by 1.92X) from node:distroless - 72.7MB => 39.7MB (minified by 1.83X) Go application images: from golang:latest - 700MB => 1.56MB (minified by 448.76X) from ubuntu:14.04 - 531MB => 1.87MB (minified by 284.10X) from golang:alpine - 258MB => 1.56MB (minified by 165.61X) from centos:7 - 615MB => 1.87MB (minified by 329.14X) Rust application images: from rust:1.31 - 2GB => 14MB (minified by 147.16X) Java application images: from ubuntu:14.04 - 743.6 MB => 100.3 MB

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Please stay tuned for updates as I share my progress! 😀 I am super excited to share that I'm embarking on my first Deploy-in-Public challenge! It's a significant milestone in my coding journey, and I'm ready to learn a lot. Shoutout to Callie Stoscup for making this possible! I'll dive into DevOps, and I know I'll fumble a lot, but that's okay. My objectives for the challenge are to hold myself accountable by sharing my progress with you all and to work through a 10-week workshop that will equip me with the skills to deploy full-stack applications using various DevOps tools and practices. The technologies I'll be using include AWS (EKS, RDS), Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Helm, PostgreSQL, React, NestJS, NodeJS, TypeScript, and Nginx. Stay tuned for updates as I share my progress, and good luck to all the other developers taking on this challenge! You got this! 👏 #deployinpublic #codingwithcallie #continuousgrowth

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Distributed tracing is a powerful observability tool, and yet, many organizations see little return for their investment. It's a familiar story: there's an initial period of enthusiasm, developers implement the tool, use it for a few weeks, and then stop using it. Meanwhile, costs keep creeping up. This excellent talk explains why that happens, and what you can do about it. Sampling can be as low as 0.01%! 🤯 https://lnkd.in/gJRdZPjY by Paige Cruz via USENIX Association SREcon24

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Struggling with efficiently managing your software engineers for your company? Wish you had a way to retain your best engineers and get your projects delivered on time? Let’s chat. I’ve built and run several large teams with the highest retention and efficiency in my divisions.

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Senior Devs / Hiring Managers—during our live webinar yesterday, we polled a few hundred recent Comp Sci grads. 60% didn’t feel that they had enough experience in Java to qualify for an enterprise coding job. Instead they’d been pointed towards Python. 80% had no experience with Unit Testing. I know Comp Sci isn’t just about software engineering; but it’s by far the largest number of available jobs for grads. If jobs are the metric that Higher Ed is judged on, this seems like a huge failure. Does this line up with your experience? How are you dealing with this skills gap when you look to onboard junior talent?

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