Hey-yo,

Long time no see! Been pretty busy with things, but decided to spin the newsletter back up together with my brother’s help. He’ll be focusing on growing the newsletter, whereas I’ll be primarily focused on publishing issues! I think it’s a win-win for everyone.

You’ll notice the format / styling of the newsletter has slightly changed. I decided to move to another newsletter platform because I was getting kind of tired of maintaining my own infrastructure. We’ll see how it goes, but hopefully it’ll result in a better end product for you guys and gals.

Anyway, here’s the issue!

Database Replication: A Practical Overview

Published: 5 February 2024

Tags: database

Atakan Serbes “delves into why replication is pivotal, various replication strategies, and their impact on system performance and consistency”.

Some highlights:

• Replication is used for reducing latency, increasing throughput, improving availability, and enhancing durability

• Leader-Follower Replication has one central “master” database with write rights, the replicas are all read-only

• Leaderless Replication is a more distributed approach, where there are many nodes that are written to / read from

PERT: A Hipster’s Guide to Project Management for Complexity and Flexibility

Published: 1 February 2024

Tags: project management, yaml

Greg Kontos describes and demonstrates an implementation of a better alternative to a Gantt chart for software project management.

Some highlights:

• PERT (Program Evaluation and Review technique) charts are a graph structure made of events and dependencies

• Each event has an estimated duration and is displayed as a node on the graph

• Can be generated using a yaml file

Making Async Rust Reliable

Published: 17 January 2024

Tags: rust, async

Tyler Mandry discusses how Async Rust should look like when it’s “done”, focusing on what the current issues with it are and how they can be addressed.

Some highlights:

• Reliability is the key theme

• Async Rust feels unreliable because of “mismatched intuitions about the control flow of async programs”

• Async still has a long way to go in Rust