Geek Reading: Destroy all IFs and API Errors are First-Class Citizens

[This may be your last chance for a while to check out the excellent reading lists that Robert Diana provides for us here at DZone.]

This is a special edition of Geek Reading for one simple reason — I am taking a break from posting Geek Reading for a while. Life and work are always very busy and I am hoping to get back to writing again. Maybe in the near future I will post an original article or opinion, and get back to what I really enjoyed but haven't had time for lately. Geek Reading will probably reappear eventually, but I have to think about the right direction for it. Thanks to everyone who has been reading and sharing Geek Reading for the past few years!

As always, enjoy today's items, and please participate in the discussions on these sites.

Startups, Career and Process

• How to De-Brilliant Your Code | DaedTech
• Some Design Up Front: An Alternative to ‘Sprint Zero’ | Atomic Object
• Agile Product Roadmap for Dummies in 4 Steps | DZone Agile
• The 3 Things Scrum Teams Get Wrong | DZone Agile
• 8 Best Practices to Start a Scrum Project | DZone Agile
• Dealing in Abstraction | DZone Agile

Design and Development

• Making custom renderers for React | Gosha Arinich
• The Hardest Part About Microservices: Your Data | Christian Posta
• MuleSoft: Digitally Sign and Verify a Document | DZone Integration
• API Errors Are First Class Citizens | DZone Integration
• My Journey in Scala, Part 1: Awakenings | DZone Java
• Announcement: Swift 3 Endgame and Swift 4 Kickoff | Erica Sadun
• Accessing Google Sheets with Ruby and Google Apps Script | Atomic Object
• Contributors do not save time | David R. MacIver
• Destroy All Ifs – A Perspective from Functional Programming | John A De Goes
• Writing custom type systems for Python in prolog | alehander42
• 4 Key Guiding Principles to Building Your Application Network | DZone Integration
• A First Look at the Newly Released JUnit 5 | DZone Java
• Exponential time complexity in the Swift type checker | Cocoa with Love

Concurrency, Performance and Scalability

• The Guts 'n' Glory of Database Internals: The curse of old age… | Ayende @ Rahien
• Real-world HTTP/2: 400gb of images per day | 99designs engineering blog
• Java Runtime Performance Monitoring: GC and Safepoints | DZone Java

AI, Machine Learning, Research, and Advanced Algorithms

• Behind Wolfram|Alpha's Mathematical Induction-Based Proof Generator | Wolfram Blog
• Mittag-Leffler function and probability distribution | john D. Cook
• Algebraic patterns – Semigroup | Badness 10.000

Big Data, Visualization, SQL, and NoSQL

• From Pig to Spark: An Easy Journey to Spark for Apache Pig Developers | Java Code Geeks
• When to use unstructured datatypes in Postgres – Hstore vs. JSON vs. JSONB | citusdata
• Billions of Messages a Day – Yelp’s Real-time Data Pipeline | Yelp Engineering

Infrastructure, Operations and DevOps

• One way to make containers network: BGP | Julia Evans

Security, Encryption and Cryptography

• The Browser is the Worst Sandbox Ever Designed | Ben Trask
• Executing non-alphanumeric JavaScript without parenthesis | PortSwigger Web Security Blog

Link Collections

• Double Shot #1706 | A Fresh Cup
• Dew Drop – July 15, 2016 (#2288) | Morning Dew
• Web Development Reading List #145: Font Loading, Scaling SVGs And Infinite Scrolling | Smashing Magazine
• Programming Digest #168 for July 18, 2016 | Weekly Programming Newsletter