Around the Web #1

I read a lot of blog posts through RSS and newsletters. Some of them are technical content related to my current job. But most of them are slightly outside of by circle of competence and an effort to make that circle big.

I've been sharing some of those links in our office Teams(weird naming Microsoft, even for you) for a long time now. But I did not think of it as some form of curation when I started doing it. I just thought, this is good or this will be useful and shared it. Only a very few people in our Team actually notice and read those. Some of them mentioned that it was useful/interesting.

I always had a thought of sharing those links in the form of week notes in my web site. But I'm too lazy to organise a system for that and to keep a schedule. I recently read this blog post about curation by Manu and I agree with him. In the age of AI generated content firehose, a human sharing a link to another website is a good filter to improve your signal to noise ratio. I decided that I should actually get around sharing the links.

I am planning to do this every two weeks, but my work and other hobbies often come in the way. From the next post, I'll also try to add my thoughts along with the link. Anyway, here is this week's links.

Monitoring & Observability

• Logging at Zerodha
• Tracing: structured logging, but better in every way

The above two links talks about setting up and maintaining logging and observability for distributed systems.

Developer Productivity with AI

I've started using Cursor as my main IDE for the last two weeks and moved away from IntelliJ completely. If you asked a week before if I'll be switching to an IDE other than Jetbrain's, I would have said no. But I've seen cursor doing great things and I just wanted to try it for few days.

If you're used to a tool for so long and want to try something new, the best way would be to switch cold turkey and using it for few weeks. That's what I did with cursor and it clicked. I don't want to go back to webstorm as of now.

I'm not pro AI I still think it is over hyped. I'm generally vary of tech trends like the Web3 circus. But Cursor is an exception, it makes experienced developers much more productive. Picking up a old project or working on a new tech is much easier with cursor. But if you're a Junior developer Stop using ChatGPT and other AI tools .

• How I became 3x more productive in 30 minutes with Cursor
• Cursor AI Tutorial for Beginners (Video)

Cloud

• The Duckbill Guide to AWS Reserved Instances

Interesting

The following links doesn't fall under any specific category, but are just the stuff that I found interesting.

• Tracking the music I listen to
• Prime's enshittified advertising (P.S: I stopped Amazon prime subscription even before reading this)
• In praise of randomness

That's about it. I'm trying to keep this as low effort as possible because that's the only way I'll keep doing it. Let me know what you think about these links or this format.