Weekend long read suggestions 2019/50

Elixir

• Where do I put startup code in Elixir?

  Quick overview of places which can be used for placing code, which you need to call during application startup. It covers Application.start/1, GenServer.start_link/3, GenServer.init/1 and GenServer.handle_continue/2. Importantly it also covers situations when something goes wrong with your code.

• Erlang Highlights 2019 - Best Of The Beam.

  Erlang Solutions published their list of the top Erlang/BEAM/Elixir resources of this year.

Data Science

• Checkout Surveys: A Data Science Approach

  Squarespace shares insight into user experience optimization process. How they setup and evaluate their experiments.

• Your Classifier is Secretly an Energy Based Model and You Should Treat it Like One

  Paper advocates use of energy based models (EBMs) to improve on ability of generative models to address current downstream discriminative problem. Also suggest reading reddit thread, where author chimed in and replied to some of the questions.

Infrastructure

• eBPF: A new BFF for Observability Startups

  eBPF is basically in-kernel virtual machine which allows running your special purpose application to run. eBPF was initially intended for packet filtering applications, but became really powerful tool for observing the operating system. It is event-based, so you can subscribe to only events which are interesting for your use-case. Check LWN intro article for more details. eBPF is definitely production ready for quite some time, Facebook and Netflix being heavy users. Also Brendan Gregg of Netflix just published a book about eBPF (eagerly waiting its delivery from Amazon :)).

• Interesting projects to check

  • Cilium is eBPF and XDP based software defined network overlay for securing your workloads.
  • docker-slim promises to make your docker images smaller by factor 0.03.