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.

Gate Crashers by Patrick S Tomlinson

Fun, light, hilarious story had me laughing out loud several times. 5/5 Stars.  The silly cardboard characters embrace their own tropiness.

Siddhartha Eine indische Dichtung von Hermann Hesse

Ich habe diese Geschichte genossen. Die Charaktere sind alle bunt und der Dialog ist wunderschön gestaltet. Der Buddhismus wird ohne Proselytisierung dargestellt. 4/5 Sterne

The dead mountaineer's inn by Borris & Arkady Strugatsky

I enjoyed this book much more than the roadside picnic. 4/5 Stars.

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I enjoyed this one.  The Mayan human sacrifice and death myths were well-crafted into a consistent magic system with great characters and a fun story. 3/5 Stars

Some Assembly Required - Decoding four billion years of life from ancient fossils to DNA by Neil Shubin

Taking a break from "lit rut shore" that I do not appreciate, I picked up another popular biology book from my queue and enjoyed this fun ride through recent, counter-intuitive findings in our current understanding of the origins and evolution in biology. 4/5 Stars.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

I stopped reading because the main character and "dignity" concept were so abhorrent.  Quiet desperation, indeed. Yuck, 1/5 Stars.    Ishiguro gets one last chance with Never Let me go and then I give up.

Serverless is not optimal for every problem

Over at Ingenious, Gabe Chertok makes some great arguments about why the inevitable NoOps Serverless future is still not yet ready for many applications and has some more maturing to do.  Among his strong reasons is inconsistency among components.  Read the whole thing.

Unfinished Code Delivery

Gandalf published another fun IISM.org article about what I call below-minimum viable software that we ship because of date pressure.  Gandalf calls it unfinished code. Enjoy.

A memory called Empire by Arkady Martine

Odd politics, good story and terrible science 1/5 Stars.  I nearly stopped reading it three times.

Otherness by David Brin

I had previously read all of the stories from their earlier collections but I had not read all of the essays and I enjoyed re-reading some of the stories for the timeliness of their concepts in the current times where shadows are cast on our societal progress towards enlightenment.  4/5 Stars.  David is always fun to read but the depth and implications cause the reading to be slow.

DevSecCon24 videos

Videos from the 24-hour, three-location DevSecOps conference DevSecCon24 are now available online.  The keynotes are bad but there are some good talks in there.

Hierarchy of needs for developers who use a "platform"

Matt Prince at CloudFlare has published this deeply insightful blog entry about what makes cloud platforms successful as measured by developer adoption and engagement.  Matt believes that the original purpose of his platform (speed) is not at all what caused the platform to be successful and is betting the future of his "Cloud Workers" platform on this hierarchy of needs:

Compliance is extremely important.  In my day job, we must use a platform that, interestingly, has almost no appeal to folks outside the company.