Every week, my Instapaper queue fills with awesome links that I rarely get time to read. I figured I’d share some from the last 7 days.

Self improvement

Take nothing personally: don’t let your emotions hold you back
http://bennesvig.com/2012/01/27/taking-nothing-personally/

Why every professional should consider blogging: this is an excellent read. Even if nobody ever reads you, you’re still doing yourself a great favor. Writing on G+ counts, too! 
http://technicalblogging.com/why-every-professional-should-consider-blogging/

Silicon Valley’s Productivity Secret: I include this because mostly I’m amused at a basic technique being heralded as a secret. Accountability is a superpower. 
http://blog.idonethis.com/post/16736314554/silicon-valleys-productivity-secret

Design

“We do more reading on the screen today than we did even a year ago. If we are ever to have a golden age of reading on the screen, this might be the start of it.” 
http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2012/01/30/the-future-of-screen-typography-is-in-your-hands/

A Beginner’s Guide to Pairing Fonts
http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/typography-articles/a-beginners-guide-to-pairing-fonts/

Programming

Java Sucks, by Jamie Zawinski. Written in 2000 but pretty instructive still. “I think Java is the best language going today, which is to say, it’s the marginally acceptable one among the set of complete bagbiting loser languages that we have to work with out here in the real world.” I have no idea if JWZ loves Clojure, but I hope he does.
http://www.jwz.org/doc/java.html

Cloud computing and big data

A Tour of Amazon’s DynamoDB: in-depth briefing on the new database
http://www.paperplanes.de/2012/1/30/a-tour-of-amazons-dynamodb.html

The Ups and Downs of the “America-Proof” Cloud
http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2012/02/the-ups-and-downs-of-the-ameri.php

Google’s Data Center Engineer Shares Secrets of “Warehouse” Computing
http://m.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/google-man/

The Great Disk Drive in the Sky: How Web giants store big—and we mean big—data
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/01/the-big-disk-drive-in-the-sky-how-the-giants-of-the-web-store-big-data.ars/1