The Bone Code: Good
In the afternoon I finished The Bone Code by Kathy Reichs. I liked the book a lot, a real page turner.
Zero-downtime schema migrations in Postgres using views
Schema migrations are tricky, especially when planned downtime is not an option. Changes need to be carefully designed to stay backwards compatible so that both the new and old schema are available simultaneously. They must also be designed to not interfere with any other queries, for example by locking up tables. Plenty has been written on how to this right but one pattern I haven’t seen mentioned often is using views.
Source: Zero-downtime schema migrations in Postgres using views, an article by Fabian Lindfors.
Extreme IO performance with parallel Apache Parquet in Python
In this post, I show how Parquet can encode very large datasets in a small file footprint, and how we can achieve data throughput significantly exceeding disk IO bandwidth by exploiting parallelism (multithreading).
Source: Extreme IO performance with parallel Apache Parquet in Python, an article by Wes McKinney.
Foundryside
Sancia Grado is a thief, and a damn good one. And her latest target, a heavily guarded warehouse on Tevanne’s docks, is nothing her unique abilities can’t handle.
But unbeknownst to her, Sancia’s been sent to steal an artifact of unimaginable power, an object that could revolutionize the magical technology known as scriving. The Merchant Houses who control this magic—the art of using coded commands to imbue everyday objects with sentience—have already used it to transform Tevanne into a vast, remorseless capitalist machine. But if they can unlock the artifact’s secrets, they will rewrite the world itself to suit their aims.
Now someone in those Houses wants Sancia dead, and the artifact for themselves. And in the city of Tevanne, there’s nobody with the power to stop them.
To have a chance at surviving—and at stopping the deadly transformation that’s under way—Sancia will have to marshal unlikely allies, learn to harness the artifact’s power for herself, and undergo her own transformation, one that will turn her into something she could never have imagined.
In the evening I started in Foundryside The Founders Trilogy Book 1 by Robert Jackson Bennett.