"Dev complete" is neither developed, nor complete.

Charity Majors published a great rant about slow testing and common CI/CD pipeline antipatterns.  The core of her analysis and prescriptive remedies struck a chord with me because in my day job, developers will claim they are "dev complete" for work that customers won't experience for weeks because of slow, centralized, large-scale CI/CD pipelines and bureaucratic, inefficient processes.  Yes, 15 minutes instead of three weeks is an attainable goal.

Wayward Galaxy by Jason Anspach & J. Chaney

Not good, 2/5 Stars.  Inconsistent, terrible plot holes, lousy science.  Good close combat.

Permafrost by Alastair Reynolds

Good story with compelling characters, great, consistent magic system and intriguing mystery.  4/5 Stars.

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

This book is not Gibson's best work but the story centers on brand, marketing, and oligarchs so I was curious.  The book is  mildly interesting but became too bizarre and surreal as the powers behind events and spy-craft became more sophisticated. I may or may not read the next book in the series. 2/5 Stars.

The Saints of Salvation by Peter F Hamilton

Fantastic conclusion to a great series.  Page turner!  5/5 Stars.

the phoenix project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, George Spafford

This was quick and fun to read.  I enjoyed how the authors intentionally paralleled the characters from The Goal and brought similar melodrama to a similar setting.  The story was fast-paced and educational.  5/5 Stars.

Agent to the stars by John Scalzi

I liked Scalzi's "big idea" serious books from 15 years ago (Old Man's War universe) but I like his recent humorous, sarcastic books much better (Collapsing Empire universe).  This book is very funny, somewhat contrived (magic system kept changing to adhere to the plot) but it was very enjoyable.  Short & fun, 5/5 Stars.

Cobra Slave by Timothy Zahn

I remember reading these "Cobra" stories in Analog magazine but I have not read other books by Timothy Zahn in the last few decades.  Some of the tech is inconsistent and not all of the physics works but the magic system is relatively consistent.  The politics are fun, except that the aliens are not alien.  I'll read the rest of the series, eventually.  3/5 Stars.

Heaven's River by Dennis E Taylor

A fun romp in the bob-i-verse! It's not as good as the first three and the plot rambled with some random, lazy writing, but still wonderfully enjoyable, extremely well voice-acted, 4/5 Stars. 

Inside the Five Sided Box by Ash Carter

I knew almost nothing about the history and topics Ash Carter covers in this interesting autobiography.  I do know a little about the politics of whistleblower Eddie Snowden that the author misrepresents and distorts.  So I am forced to doubt other slanted and omitted points of view on the topics he covers.  Nonetheless I learned a lot and recommend the book, 3/5 Stars.

PLATO, GÖDEL, SPINOZA, AHAB - interview with Rebeca Neuberger Goldstein

This wonderful interview with Rebbeca Goldstein is a great summary of her books and thoughts. I have become more curious about philosophy and found the concepts very interesting.

Inspired by Marty Cagan

The second edition of this book is really good. It is insightful, prescriptive, and detailed.  The author is harsh and unapologetic in his observations and criticisms of the anti-patterns plaguing many companies, putting a sharper contrast on why the winners are winning.  Highly recommended.  This one is definitely one of the top-5 management books I have read this year.  If you need the cliffs spark notes summary, here is a decent one.  But the author gives great color and nuance to the points, so read the book. 5/5 Stars!

atomic batteries to power!

Many science fiction stories from the early 20th century feature "atomic batteries" that provide electrical power for decades by harnessing the power of radioactivity somehow.  This company claims they have developed a safe method by using tiny Carbon-14 diamonds.  (This blog post title is from the campy Batman tv series opening sequence)

farm in a shipping container feeds 150 people

This inexpensive "Farm in a Box" is a shipping container packed with hoes, shovels, a drip irrigation system, and sundry other high- and low-tech items.  You need labor, water, and 2 acres of land.  You can grow any crops you like, on any 2-acre plot (that has water).  You can feed up to 150 people per year.  The system comes with training and high-tech optimizations for water, power, & harvest cooling.

The concept is extremely expensive and inefficient compared to modern food production.  But the idea does contain an interesting improvement to the exorbitantly expensive, wasteful and inefficient "farm to table" local food production fad that is raising food prices and eroding our economy. It is also a good intermediate step for developing nations whose forming cannot quickly leapfrog to modern farming to feed their growing populations.

DevSecOps: Empower developers to secure their code faster

Nathan Brown posted a great example of proactive developers holding themselves accountable for the security of their code and quickly implementing a thoughtful well-designed fix.  

Everyone knows that large, centralized process-oriented "enforcement" Information Security (InfoSec) organizations produce a culture and environment where developers perceive security as friction or an obstacle to delivering value to customers.  Developers then hack in bad design hacks to satisfy the security scan and ship sooner. A suicidally destructive culture evolves where a "cat and mouse" game of compliance police versus sloppy developers destroys trust and achieves neither secure design nor enough value delivery velocity for the enterprise to remain competitive.  This anti-patterns is part of what I call the "Bureaucracy-led un-imagination" that one new CEO has called "past failures" in need of a "tech led reimagination."

lead time, deployment frequency, change failure rate, time to recovery

Dina Graves Portman gave a great talk at the continuous deployment foundation on "measuring devops." The video is here and the slides are here.

Why Cloud Native?

I shall not be able to attend this webinar but it appears to contain some cogent and important arguments for why companies should abandon tech stacks that prevent their companies from being competitive.

dispelling some myths about our inevitable serverless future

Rishidot Research dispels some of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt about embracing our inevitable future on serverless architectures.  However there are still many problems that do not yet align to the capabilities of current serverless design patterns.

auto-generate mocks for testing before your dependency is ready

I have always lusted after a faster and easier way to accelerate development by generating end-to-end tests for a contract simply by writing the client or the service.  Pact is exactly what I wanted. If you are a consumer of a yet-to-be-written RESTful service or GraphQL service, you just write your client.  Then add a few tests of the contract.  Pact then generates your mock for you.  If you are writing a service waiting for clients to be written that consume your service, again, just write the code and a few tests.  Tests are the best way to communicate the terms and conditions of your contract.  Pact unblocks teams dependent on each other.  Very cool.

The annual struggle begins . . .

Before:

After:

Next week TreeBeard the oak tree will dump another load for us to clean up.

OpenTelemetry is coming

Michael Hausenblas gives us a great overview and future look at the emerging OpenTelemtry standard.  envoy v3 support means the services mesh will support it as well.  We appear to have a worthy successor to the simple, elegant, and venerable SMTP.

The Warship, rise of the jain book 2

Non-stop fighting with odd motivations, 3/5 stars

our interstellar probe is still transmitting data from interstellar medium

The space probe we designed in the 1950's and completed its grand tour of our solar system before going interstellar is still working fine. (Previously).  For more cool, 1950's tech see Sprint Missile - 0 to Mach 10 in 15 Seconds - 100Gs & 6000°F. Or, my favorite, the big stick.

Netflix's distributed tracing system

Here is another great blog posting on the netflix technology blog about their interesting distributed tracing system. The low-cost storage implementation and intentionally small sampling rate for non-critical microservices are interesting cost optimizations.

StackHawk for DevSecOps

This demonstration of StackHawk is a very compelling plug that makes StackHawk look like a great tool for developers to build security into their code as early and conveniently as possible.

The Boat of a Million Years by Poul Anderson

I found this book to be an interesting, entertaining utopian very-long epic with some interesting characters and long historical perspectives.  I prefer more optimistic post-scarcity utopias but this one was not terrible and Anderson explores the dream of immortality reasonably well. 3/5 Stars.  Not great but ok.

Paper recycling increases Carbon emission

It's interesting that despite our passion and large-scale efforts to reduce, reuse, recycle, paper recycling is "not the lever" we should pull, other than preventing the downstream effects of paper in landfills and the resulting methane.

Accelerate by N Forsgren, J Humble, G Kim

I was a little skeptical when I started reading this book, especially after reading Martin Fowler's lukewarm recommendation in the preface.  Surveys and correlations sounded much too soft for my "scientific method" & objective evidence approach to understanding phenomena.  However the authors did win me over in the second half of the book by explaining in detail how psychographics has evolved to become a hard, predictive science.  So I do recommend reading it in detail and referring to the prescriptive advice.

The fluff in the beginning is why we should care, the importance of culture, and the need for better practices.  Then the book goes into the most-important measurements, including deployment frequency, lead times, recovery (roll-back) times, and time between failures -- the normal duty cycle of machines we know and use from the 19th century.

The next few chapters go into measuring and nudging culture and technical patterns and practices. What I love about the measurements and practices is that they force teams to minimize the waste of antipattern practices such as tickets, manual work, manual testing, and monolithic security / compliance / ops organizations -- the developer experience becomes much better and the obvious bottlenecks become more pronounced to leaders.

Then the book talks about sustainable work (preventing burn out), employee satisfaction, team identity, engagement, leadership, coaching, and management.

I enjoyed the book and recommend it.  5/5 Stars.

A Window into Time by Peter F Hamilton

Short, interesting and light, 3/5 Stars.

Object oriented approach can be harmful

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRTfhkiAqPw

This video is a fantastic and withering attack on the obfuscation, inefficiency, and poor maintainability caused by our gratuitous  over-use of the object-oriented approach to everything.  In many cases, traditional procedural programming is more appropriate.  5/5 Stars, must watch!

Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro

Very good writing, emotional, immersive, and gripping. The tragedies are very poignant and depressing but not very uplifting, unfortunately.  3/5 Stars.

A sense of Urgency by John P Kotter

Despite the author's choice of case studies, the research, concepts, and prescriptive guidance are quite good.  The author chose 20th century global-100 manufacturing conglomerates and the cultures in each case assumed only CEOs and C-level officers made any decisions or did any work.  Middle managers and other wage slaves were not considered.  The details and nuances of distinguishing anxiety and false-urgency from the positive energy of true urgency were great. Similarly the author's analysis of "every crisis is an opportunity" is very good.  And finally, the details and prescription of behaviors and processes are valuable.  I do recommend the book; consider listening to the audio version at 1.5X or 2X speed.  3/5 Stars.

The Abyss Beyond Dreams by Peter F. Hamilton

I don't like the "Fallers" life form or the stories surrounding them, 2/5 Stars.  The story lines are also depressing.

Fallen Dragon by Peter F Hamilton

Fun story.  Very enjoyable.  5/5 Stars.

The ten thousand doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

Fantastic, beautiful, great literature.  This book is one of the top 10 I have read this year. 5/5 Stars.

Fwd: The Snail on the Slope by Boris & Arkady Strugatsky

I struggled with this one.  If I had read the afterword before reading the story I would have enjoyed it much more.  To understand the story, I think one must read it twice.  I had no idea what was going on in the universe and was very confused.  It is very well written but I did not infer the setting from the descriptions and actions.  2/5 Stars.

Chicago DevOpsDays

Chicago DevOps Days Online

There is something for everyone in the videos and decks from DevOps days in Chicago.  I love the lightning talks.  A good guide to the talks is by Rich Burroughs here.

Did the truth even matter? by Pat Jones

The book is a little shrill and repetitive but also very timely during the current political climate in the USA.  The massive destruction and evil power of fake news, unchecked concentration of power, accepted unethical behaviors, and bureaucratic incompetence deserves the bright light Pat shines on this microcosm of our society.  It is unlikely the citizens of the greater Seattle area will ever discover the truth about the Bellevue high school football dynasty or disabuse themselves of the fake news they believe because of the Seattle Times headlines.  But Pat's comprehensive data in the book are a noble, bright candle in the windy darkness.  Highly recommended, 5/5 Stars.

Buffalo Dogs by Lawrence Schoen

Fun! Short. 4/5 Stars.

Ballistic: The Palladium Wars book 2 by Marko Kloos

The story is still burning very slowly, as the secret forces behind the pirate terror are not revealed. 3/5 Stars.  I wish the story would move a little faster.

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman and Dirk Maggs

Audible adapted the graphic novel to audio format.  It's not terrible because Gaiman's story-telling is not completely destroyed by the DC universe.  But it does the graphic novel little justice.  3/5 Stars.

Did the Truth even matter?

I just bought the epub version of this book.  Buddha Baker and Myles Jack played with my son on 4 of those championship teams.

Manhattan in reverse by Peter F. Hamilton

Great collection of stories. 4/5 Stars.

Hilarious Q2 major outage report

Colin Bartlet from "StatusGator" published this wonderful report of some high-profile 2020 Q2 service outages.  I chased the link of slack's root cause analysis that was also informative.  I know of at least one other company where the culture is very similar to that of T-Mobile, and issues are hidden.

Critical Thinking by Stuart Vyse

This collection of audio podcasts from professor Vyse's seminars was most-popular so I gave it a listen.  About a quarter of the information was new to me or placed into a different context but I still found it worthwhile.  3/5 Stars.

Aftershocks: Palladium Wars Book 1 by Marko Kloos

Not much going on as the book sets the stage for the rest of the story to come in future books.  Interesting universe.  Abrupt ending in the middle of the story, though. 3/5 Stars.

Flux CD oppa gitops style!

Those clever developers of flux have evolved their gitops continuous delivery pattern and released flux v2.0 at the heart of a containerized orchestration framework.  Check out their tutorial. oppa gitops style!

Software Engineering presentations for a non-technical audience

Hilary Nussbaum has some thin but interesting advice for development managers who are trying to communicate what they have done to a non-technical audience.  She concentrates on three measures of code velocity to illustrate a team's success at planning and execution.  But she also recommends discussing customer-affecting reactive support incident volume to reflect quality.  She frames her advice as a CTO talking to her board of directors but the ideas are applicable to a development manager at any level of any organization.

network address translation (NAT)

Dave Anderson takes us on a very-long journey of everything you always wanted to know about NAT but were afraid to ask.  If you are so lucky that you have never had to deal with STUN, ICE, or other NAT issues, congratulations!  Dave's long article is a great tutorial, easy to follow, and comprehensive.

What's the difference between monitoring and observability?

Charity Majors has some (strong) opinions about the differences.  Fundamentally, monitoring is to keep track of known unknowns (1OI or first order of ignorance). Observability is to speed detection, diagnosis, and recovery from unknown unknowns (2OI or second order of ignorance).  She articulates in great detail what all she considers requisite for true observability and creates an awesome wishlist.  I stumbled upon her definition because I was reading Charity's recent article expressing her views on the evolution of the operations role in an organization.