A harsh, but objective view on the new industry buzzword – the blockchain:

Nobody’s in charge, and you can’t change or delete anything, only view and input data.
The first, best-known – and practically only – use of blockchain technology is bitcoin, the digital currency that allows you to transfer money without the involvement of a bank.
There are now three mining pools which are responsible for more than half of all the new bitcoin (and also for checking payment requests). 
Blockchain generalises the bitcoin pitch: let’s not just get rid of banks, but also the land registry, voting machines, insurance companies, …
The only thing is that there’s a huge gap between promise and reality. It seems that blockchain sounds best in a PowerPoint slide. Most blockchain projects don’t make it past a press release

https://thecorrespondent.com/655/blockchain-the-amazing-solution-for-almost-nothing/84495599980-95473476?mc_cid=ac542d3dec&mc_eid=6ff15a57b7

Just like Sheldon Cooper, I love lists. If I would make a list of things that I love, lists would be one of the first items. So here’s an awesome list of Laws, Principles, Mental Models, Cognitive Biases. One example:

“The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.”

https://github.com/lukasz-madon/awesome-concepts?mc_cid=5bdc7c6f5a&mc_eid=6ff15a57b7#cunninghams-law

Ronnie won his sixth World Snooker Championship. A week after, he sat together with Simon Hattenstone, the ghostwriter who helped him write his biography.

He was always regarded as the sport’s most naturally gifted player; now the consensus is that he’s the greatest.
Ronnie is called the Rocket for his speed and power. But there is also a sublime grace to his playing – the way he makes the cue ball dance, the delicacy with which he picks off balls and opens up the pack, his balance, the ability to swap from right to left hand depending on his shot or mood. In a sport not overly blessed with charismatic players, he has been the personality of snooker for a quarter of a century.
 In his 30s he became obsessed with middle-distance running. “A lot of the time I would think: ‘I don’t actually want to win this match because I’ve got a five-mile cross-country race I want to win back in Essex.’ Running became more important than snooker. 
Now, he is in a good place. He came off medication when he realised it was making him moody and he was taking it out on his son. He is sticking with natural serotonin – running. In lockdown he got himself a coach and has not looked back. “I can run for an hour, 7.45- to 8-minute miling. Running is my drug.” 
I ask him about the future, expecting him to talk about books, endorsements, punditry and a bit of snooker. “The one thing I thought I’d excel in was being in the care industry,” he says. Is he serious? He nods. “I can empathise with people in addiction”. 

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/aug/23/i-was-the-king-of-sabotage-ronnie-osullivan-on-controversy-comebacks-and-becoming-a-carer

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1. Improve ColdFusion performance by 1000x?

I recently had to deal with some ColdFusion page optimization. Although the result was not 1000 better like in this case, the approach was more or less similar. Instead of SQL indexes + rewriting queries inside loops + caching queries, I only had to do a combination of:
– reducing the number of DB queries by moving them outside loops
– using cfqueryparam. In addition to making things more secure, turns out it also has a significant impact on performance tuning.

Update: Some more improvements:
– ColdFusion whitespace management
– getting rid of the old cfform
– gzipping the content transferred to the browser

The end result was a 30x-50x performance improvement.

2. About helping others

Apparently helping others is embedded in every human’s DNA. Here’s an excerpt (no spoilers) from Andy Meir’s ‘The Martian’ – one of the best SF novels I ever read:

Every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true. […] This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, buy they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do.
– The Martian (coming in a theater near you in 2015)

The downside of this ‘feature’ of the human behavior is that it can be exploited. For example, in computer security, individuals who are attempting to social engineer some piece of information strongly rely on this aspect of the human nature:

Don’t rely on network safeguards and firewalls to protect your information. Look to your most vulnerable spot. You’ll usually find that vulnerability lies in your people. […]
Most people generally want to help somebody who is requesting help.
– CompTIA Security

3. The Rosie Project

The Rosie project is an amazingly enjoyable book about a socially-challenged scientist who is working his way through the process of finding a life partner. Also recommended by Bill Gates. If anyone makes a movie out of it, I hope they pick Jim Parsons for the main role 🙂