sonia | Links: Tech related

I've had some of these open in tabs for quite a while

How a 27-year-old busted the myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity by Andy Greenberg.

All of it began when a young, puzzle-loving mathematician named Sarah Meiklejohn started to pull out traceable patterns in the apparent noise of Bitcoin’s blockchain.. This excerpt from Tracers in the Dark reveals how Meiklejohn came to the discoveries that would launch that new era of crypto criminal justice.

Substack partners with protofascists by Marisa Kabas. Putting this here for the next time someone asks me why Substack is a problematic newsletter host.

Leaders and Followers

Followership by Jason Wong.

Everyone likes to talk about leadership—we are culturally conditioned to view success as a progression through leadership positions—but there is far less attention paid to being a good follower.

On Rake Collections and Software Engineering by Diego Elio Pettenò.

My understanding of Matthew’s metaphor is that senior developers (or senior software engineers, or senior systems engineers, and so on) are at the same time complaining that their coworkers are making mistakes (“stepping onto rakes”, also sometimes phrased as “stepping into traps”), while at the same time making their environment harder to navigate (“spreading more rakes”, also “setting up traps”).

Thoughts on "Being a Senior Engineer" by Adam Keys. A response to On Being a Senior Engineer by John Allspaw, about the responsibilities and abilities of a mature engineer.

Salaries

What is your labor worth? Tech compensation in 2021 by Jacob Kaplan-Moss. The tech job market is much tougher in 2024 than 2021, but there's still good advice here about how to get a sense of the market.

How to Ask For a Raise by Alison Green.

If you’re like a lot of people, you might have gone your entire career without ever asking for a raise. It’s surprisingly common for workers, particularly women, to wait for their employer to dole out raises rather than proactively requesting one.

Technical

On Long Term Software Development by Bert Hubert. Recommendations for long-term software development, caring (enough) about the future.

A mastodon thread on suggestions for email newsletter providers. I investigated several of these when I accidentally broke my phpList/Mailgun setup recently. I ended up figuring out how to fix my setup rather than giving my list to a third party. (I incautiously upgraded the Mailgun plugin in phpList, and it stopped working. I figured out how to downgrade it again and was back in business.)

Go structs are copied on assignment (and other things about Go I'd missed) by Julia Evans

Exploring Javascript book by Dr. Axel Rauschmayer. I keep thinking I should learn Javascript, but so far I've just had to do a few things around the edges.

The Myth of the Modular Monolith (video tech talk) by Eileen Uchitelle.