In one of my group chats, one friend said he regrets learning Python as his first programming language. During those last months, he used Scala extensively in his daily data-engineering job and found it more suitable and robust than Python.
I recently had the same feeling. While my first programming classes were about Pascal and C++, I've mostly used Python since then. But whenever I had to switch to another language due to some constraint of dealing with a legacy codebase I always discover new concepts and new ways to see things.
Since then I started to learn Go and React. It confirmed my feelings.
Is starting with Python a better choice? Why is it important to have a variety of skills? How does learning multiple programming languages offer more skills than we realize?
Some notes around this subject in the monthly blog post below 😉 + this thread-debate about Python and programming languages...
📡 Expected Contents
Rill
Dashboarding is always something awful to me. It feels like old and legacy. It has been years that I feel the lack of a "Dashboard As Code" solution. I even consider building one sometimes...
I think we're on the right path though. I recently played extensively with Rill. It's dead simple, fast and maintainable. Furthermore, it's very nice to drill down into data. Something hard and long to do when building classic dashboards.
Go play with it. You won't be disappointed.
We Need To Think Less Like Engineers And More Like Gardeners
Very nice blog post. Food for thoughts on what's to be an engineer and a leader.
YAML Pitfalls and Why None of Them Apply to Kestra
This is probably my favorite piece of content from Kestra's blog recently (Anna at play, like always 💪).
YAML is not the solution to all problems. Programming languages are needed to build complex logic, catch errors, handle business rules, etc.
In fact, under every "declarative" language is an imperative one. Terraform HCL = Go. SQL = C++/C (depends on the engine).
At Kestra we have built a syntax that enables language-agnostic declarative orchestration. It's YAML on steroids 💪. It parses YAML to detect errors with built-in syntax validation. It makes it easy to create modules and reusable components. It validates syntax before saving a flow.
All those add-ons allow to be more productive and resilient to the usual YAML pitfalls.
YAML engineering is real 😅.
Designing One Big Table (OBT)
Like many nowadays, OBT is my favorite go-to data modeling technique.
Here is a great article going deeper on the different designs possible around OBT and corresponding patterns.
📰 The Blog Post
Expanding Your Programming Horizons - Beyond Python
Following this issue's introduction, here is a more detailed blog post about programming languages and how learning new ones can expand our horizons.
🎨 Beyond The Bracket
Pacing layers are an idea of Stewart Brand, describing how society changes at different paces.
Duncan recently came out with an analog idea around "reading layers".
[...] I'm trying to read fewer news articles and more books, and I realized that I kind of have a pace layer thing going on there too.
My reading layers, going from slowest to fastest would be books, long-form articles, RSS feeds & newsletters, newspaper articles, forums and chatrooms (Discord, Slack, etc), and then social media at the top.
Layers that are higher up change faster, but are quicker to experience. When I've got a couple of minutes and I'm looking for something snacky, I'll opt for one of those. When I've got a long train journey and I want to immerse myself in something nourishing, I'll opt for a lower layer.
Just like with pace layers, though, I feel like I spend my life a little higher in the strata than I would ideally want to. I'll opt for another refresh of the Guardian homepage over opening my read-it-later app, let alone pulling the book out of my bag that I brought along with the best of intentions.
I believe in this whole idea a lot! Always nice to come back to it and find out where we are in our pacing layers - in every part of our life.
Wishing you all the best for this new year ✨
2023 was full of new stuff and mixed-up moments for me.
2024 will probably be about hard work, discoveries, and leisure.
Let's start with that great schedule.
You're more than 400 reading those lines. This space, this newsletter, is something very personal and valuable to me. Even more when I know you like it.
I'll continue to write it monthly. Keeping down into a lower pace strata feels like the thing to do in this noisy world.
I hope you're doing well :)
See you in Feb 👋