East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Top 5 books I have read this year.  Fantastic story, characters, descriptions, 5/5 Stars.

Checkov scanner and Terraform Security

Bridgecrew, the company that sells a commercial version of the free checkov Infrastructure as code security scanner, has published this interesting "be afraid!" report about all the vulnerabilities they have detected in public terraform code.  It's worth skimming.

Design Docs

Malte Ubl (inventor of accelerated mobile pages -- AMP) at Google published the guidelines he uses at Google for design documents.  It's interesting because of the expectations authors have on the readers of the document that are very different from the practices where I work.

The Last Theorem by Frederik Pohl & Arthur C Clarke

I read this one when it came out in 2008 and did not remember the space alien plot (it is forgettable). It is no better this time, 2/5 Stars.  Meh.

operational incidents: management prevents learning

John Allspaw presents two years of learning from the field, exposing interesting anti-patterns and common practices that prevent learning.  It's definitely worth skimming.

https://speakerdeck.com/jallspaw/findings-from-the-field-devops-enterprise-london-2020

The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault

I read this book in the late 1960s when I was reading Renault's Arthurian works and did not like it then.  It was no better this time.  1/5 Stars. Disrecommend.

Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State by Barton Gellman

Better than the other Snowden books, 5/5 Stars.

The Last Emprox by John Scalzi

A wonderful conclusion to the trilogy, this finale has great plot twists, character arcs, and a satisfying conclusion.  Scalzi stays within the rules of his magic system and delivers a clever solution. 5/5 Stars.

BTRFS @ scale

The B-Tree File System (BTRFS) on Linux is gaining ground inside of Facebook for many use cases, workloads, and applications at enormous scale.  In particular, the file system snapshot feature provides enormous space and CPU savings for workloads involving large numbers of delete operations -- even better than tombstoning. Check out this interview with one of the lead developers, Josef Bacik this month at the Open Source Summit.  If you prefer watching videos to reading, check out these videos.

Anti-Patterns and Patterns in continuous delivery practices

A bunch of people have recently picked up on Matt Skelton's talk (and his book) to dispel some of the most-common myths and articulate the worst anti-patterns along with their associated better practice patterns in improving code velocity.  It's worth skimming the deck.

why & how to create isolated environments per pull request

Avner Sorek from env0 gives a mini-tutorial on how & why to create an isolated test environment for your pull requests and integrate the process with git-ops (git actions in your continuous integration pipeline). The power of containerization enables creating temporary environments that are completely isolated in all phases of developing your web application from machine-local through all phases of testing, integration, and deployment.  And if you are in a hurry, you can run many of them in parallel.  On a public cloud the instant provisioning and tear-down of these environments and all infrastructure needed are simple and straightforward.  Some private, on-premise clouds are not yet capable of enabling these features.

Tau Zero by Poul Anderson

Despite the 1967 outdated cosmology and physics, this book still holds up well.  I am very sorry I did not read it during my personal "golden age" of science fiction (15 years old) but I still loved this book.  I picked the book up during my personal celebration of the 60-year-old concept of a Bussard Ramjet that uses interstellar Hydrogen for fuel.  The ship in this story (called the Leonora Christine) is one of the main characters.  5/5 Stars.

The Evolutionary Void by Peter F Hamilton

Thrilling conclusion with great plot twists; some lazy writing with late introduction of new powerful minor characters. 4/5 Stars.

Another perspective on Chaos Engineering as Validation Testing

The folks over at ChaosMesh.com have a kindler, gentler view of Chaos Engineering as another approach to testing.

HashiConf (Digital) review

Rich Burroughs gives us a long, detailed review of the virtual HashiConf[erence].  The keynotes are interesting and the new features in Terraform 0.13 are cool.

The Dreaming Void by Peter F. Hamilton

Fun, great story, rich characters.  Awesome dialogue, fun space opera, 4/5 Stars.