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.