today's leftovers
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What is RSS?
Some sites have a feed, but don’t tell you about it. The good news is that the feed can often be guessed. If the website was “example.com”, these are the most likely places to find its feed: [...]
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Cryptographic Agility and Superior Alternatives
Cryptographic agility is a vaguely defined property, but is commonly understood to mean, “Able to quickly swap between cryptographic primitives in response to new attacks.”
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The Myth of Mass Collaboration
(1) After playing this for 3 years, I’ve learned that you have to learn about your team mates styles, and this can only happen if you consistently play with the same folks. So playing with random people makes that impossible. (2) If you do stumble upon a stranger who is a great player, they probably… don’t think the same about you. The large supply of players on the internet means that it’s better to move on and try new team players, than to keep playing with someone with worse skills than you. This means that everyone who plays Apex with strangers is just constantly on the outlook of great team mates, and those great players don’t want to commit to anyone who is worse than them. You’re left with 3 options: either you keep on playing with mediocre players, and rarely win; or you climb up to the top 100 players, become a pro and develop friendships with the pros; or you play only with friends who want to commit to teamwork with you.
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Composability and generic routes in Ema 0.8
tldr: Announcing a rewrite of Ema (a static site generator in Haskell with hot reload destined to develop an unique kind of apps) with support for generic route encoders and composability.
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Mentoring as a power multiplier in open source
Many developers struggle with work-life balance. They are overloaded with regular tasks and frequently called upon to solve urgent customer issues. Yet many developers, like me, have ideas they want to promote if only they had time to do so. Sometimes these pet ideas do not make it through the product management feature-selection process. Other times, a developer does not have time to complete the solution end-to-end on their own, yet they know if it could somehow be implemented, the project would benefit.
This is where mentoring comes in. Mentorship has many benefits: It helps the mentee's personal development, and it can improve the mentor's self-confidence and leadership skills. I discussed these benefits in an interview about skillful mentoring in the Red Hat Research Quarterly that includes many tips for a rewarding mentor relationship.
However, in the scenario I just described, mentorship has another very practical benefit: It helps with enrolling developers in the projects the mentor-developer wants to promote. In this article, I will explain how you can use mentoring as a power multiplier in the open source software (OSS) world and create a multi-win situation by mentoring people who further contribute to the open source community.
This article is based on my experience mentoring students as part of the collaboration between my organization and Reichman University, but it can apply to any mentorship situation.
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The Ubuntu 22.04 server installer wants you to scrub reused disks first
In theory the Ubuntu 22.04 server installer will cope with reused disks that already have partitions on them, perhaps partly because some vendors ship server systems with pre-partitioned drives. In my experience, this can often work fine in practice. But every so often, things go wrong, and the installer will give you an opaque message that it crashed after you did network setup (sometimes, after you picked the Ubuntu mirror to use), before getting to disk selection and partitioning. These crashes seem especially common if you have disks with previous software RAIDs on them, either complete or merely one disk out of several.