Chesterton's Fence

Among the fascinating concepts I came across while reading a book about software engineering for long-lived code is "Chesterton's Fence," or second-order thinking.  The TL;DR is that if we do not consider the rationale of previous decisions and understand how we arrived at a certain phenomenon or dilemma we can frequently make a situation worse instead of better.

The boy who would live forever by Frederik Pohl

I enjoyed this story, despite the plot contrivances, 3/5 Stars.

10 best practices for remote software engineering by Vanessa Sochat

This relatively long article in the Communications of the ACM (CACM) article explains the top best practices, habits, and sensibilities for remote software engineers.

The details are very important and some of the definitions contain non-obvious concepts, so don't rely on this summary:

1. Work on things that you care about;
2. Define goals for yourself;
3. Define productivity for yourself;
4. Establish routine and environment;
5. Take responsibility for your work;
6. Take responsibility for human connection;
7. Practice empathetic review;
8. Have self-compassion;
9. Learn to say yes, no, and not anymore; and
10. Choose correct communication channels

Number 2, for example, is about self-compassion, setting charting your own career course, being mindful and forgiving of yourself.

Flow Framework by Mik Kersten

For large tech organizations falling into a death spiral of technical debt, this framework offers some hope.  Tech organizations optimize for how their success is measured.  These measurements appear to motivate better behaviors, even when we account for the common practice of "gaming" metrics instead of embracing their purpose.  The author gave a great talk called The CIO who mistook tech debt for a hat emphasizing the "agnosia" of leaders.  He also wrote the book Project to Product.

Cautionary Story of Services Mesh pitfalls, failures

Eric Fossas posted this horror story of istio failures and weaknesses and warnings about linkerd to which he switched.  He does not even mention the added latencies and failures the extra network hops incur.

Escape Route by Peter F Hamilton

Interesting story in one of Hamilton's universes, not bad, not great.  It's a little too dense and the magic system is not good.  3/5 Stars.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Fantastic, better than his first two books, 5/5 Stars, highly recommended!

Software Engineering at Google

This book is really interesting.  There are many details not only of the policies, patterns, practices, and interesting scale at Google, but also (more useful), an analysis of common software engineering problems, trade-offs, and alternatives for many policies and approaches.  The book is rich with examples and some cookbook guidance for different situations.

GitOps Con 2021

The GitOps conference 2021 has posted all their talks on YouTube. Enjoy.

SQLite databases on static web sites such as github.io

This capability and technology is very cool!

Pyston v2.2 is 30% faster

Pyston v2.2 was released.  It appears to be gaining momentum.

Pixie Observability framework on the extended Berkeley Packet Framework

Building on the what-you-need-only-when-you-need-it concept of Mantis, Pixie enables you to create "Pixie Edge Modules" (PEMs).  PEMs are full body request traces (via eBPF); or PEMs can be system metrics or K8s events.  There is no need for any code-changes because Pixie runs underneath your containers, services, and applications; Pixie guarantees less than 5% overhead. Custom metrics, traces & logs can be integrated into Pixie Command Module (PCMs) for your own, arbitrary traces or metrics.  The PCMs run in your K8s cluster and are operated by command line.  It's a much-richer observability platform than a mesh.  Let's see if the concept takes off.

Displaying measurements in dashboards

I recently stumbled across this insightful and detailed advice for user experience design of dashboard displays.  Grafana appears to take many of these guidelines into account when it creates default dashboards from my time series data but I have noticed most engineers make their dashboards much too complex by default.

Kubecon-EU 2021 redux

In previous years, my company sent folks to Kubecon & Kubecon-EU almost since the conferences started.  However, this year I was unable to find any read-outs or trip reports internally, and I had no budget allocated to pay for my folks to go, so I retreated to others' public write-ups online.  Danny Bryant wrote this one. His summary is not bad.  Dany's key take-aways: Developers, and developer experience, within public cloud is a big deal; End users are making a big impact in the cloud native world right now; Networking in the cloud and K8s are is still evolving and unstable; Open standards are providing key abstractions, extensibility, and innovation; Control planes are where the most end user value is being created; Anyone can (and should) contribute to the community: docs are a great place to start.

Rich Burroughs wrote this longer write-up with more-detailed summaries of the talks.

Why are all CEOs of trillion dollar companies originally software engineers?

  

The International Institute of Software Management (iism.org) features a relatively long but worthwhile analysis of why there are so many successful CEOs who were developers. and guidance for leaders who started out as developers for applying their skills to wealth creation and success.

(All of the links in this post were removed because Google claims they violate the reader's privacy. You will need to duckduckgo search for the iism article.)

Fwd: Better Code Review Practices

  I recently reminded folks at work that it sometimes helps to look back at the issues we put into our code in the last 3-9 months.  We can formulate a short (3-5 item)  bullet list in a checklist.  The list is the 3-5 most-frequent types of errors we made in the recent past. The checklist reminds us during code reviews  to look for the same type of bug in  new code while we  are reviewing the new code.  Of course, the checklist must change, so there is effort in re-reviewing the last 3 months of bugs 4x per year and updating the checklist.  If all the bugs we put in are unique and there are no visible patterns, this effort is not worth doing. This idea comes from Steve McConnell's book Code Complete.  He calls the process "checklist driven code reviews" and he published a (long) list of common patterns of issues as examples.  Steve's book and approaches are quite old and modern integrated experiences and tools enable more, better refactoring, as well as some new difficulties for reviewers.

Over the weekend, I stumbled upon this interesting post from Mike Lynch with very-useful advice for how you should formulate your pull requests so that reviewers can more-easily review your code.

(All links in this post were removed because Google claims they violate the readers's privacy.  You will need to duckduckgo search for the book, the checklist, and Mike Lynch's blog post about formulating pull requests for code review.)

augmenting our bodies

In his first book, More than Human in 2010, our buddy Mez took us on some great thought experiments about the promise of brain-enhancing drugs and body-enhancing prosthetic devices such as exoskeletal limbs.  We are starting to see early prototypes of concepts beyond simple enhancements and towards additional functionality.  The third thumb project is one example.

Do YOUR Job first

Charity Majors posted some more good career advice in her blog on 2021-03-07.  It's about focus and getting YOUR job done first, before you get distracted by all the other important work that is peripheral to the mission and purpose of your own job.   Many of us are attracted to shiny, new objects and are easily distracted.  Other folks are opportunistically looking to gain credit or glory unrelated to their job.

In 2016, on their way to their fifth (and best) super bowl championship, the New England Patriots cut one of the best players and athletes on their team, Jaime Collins.  Collins is a fantastic player.  Why was he cut?  To function effectively and win as a team, each person must do her own job first. Do YOUR job.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Fantastic story, amazing history, gripping, dense with aphorisms and life lessons, rich, colorful characters, 5/5 Stars, one of the 3 best books I have read this year, highly recommended.  Thank you, Senthil.

Blood of Elves by Andrzej Sapkowiski

My kids kept saying great things about this series so I picked up the first book.  I have a very  strong preference for space opera or hard sci-fi.  But the story, characters, & politics are very well-crafted.  The magic system is mysterious and appears arbitrary at first but one assumes readers discover more about it as the story progresses in future books.  I may finish the next two books but my queue of books to read has been growing. 3/5 Stars.

as the basis for a manned lunar lander, being able to land is good

The SpaceX "starship" prototype rocket landed successfully today. 

Surveillance Capitalism

I am curious about HIPAA laws in the age of Surveillance Capitalism and proof-of-vaccination requirements.  I shall soon take a course on this topic so I may soon find out.

Gerry's Kids

As I mention from time to time, my youth and values were shaped by our mid-20th century enlightened optimism and confidence in our better future shaped by science & technology. This new documentary about Gerard K. O'Neill is a wonderful story that communicates the attitudes & feelings we had during that time.  Reading The High Frontier was one of the most life-changing events in my life.  It is no coincidence that the founders and leaders of all of the trillion dollar companies in the world today "bet the company" on big hairy audacious goals that required inventing new technology.  They are optimistic we can invent and engineer our way into the vision.  A simple example is that consumer Starlink satellite dishes currently sell for much less than their cost to manufacture.

Galaxy's Edge Dark Operator, book 3 No Fail by Doc Spears et al

The story is starting to get a little better, 3/5 Stars.

DevxConf 2021

In case you missed DevxConf on Wednesday 2021-04-28 and Thursday 2021-04-29, here is a YouTube playlist of all the talks.

Successful System Hand-Over

Aleksandra Govilovska has published a fantastic, dense, and comprehensive guide on how, successfully to transfer a software system to a different team.  This guide is a fantastic resource for your own checklist and project plan.

Steven Pinker's Psych-1 Class Lectures are Free Online

As a big fan of Steven Pinker's popular science writing, TED lectures, and enlightenment ideas, I was thrilled to discover that Harvard has made all of the videos from his new Freshman college class on Psychology freely available.  Many of the lectures are stand-alone, intrinsically interesting subjects.  I wish I had time to watch all the lectures, sigh.

Neil Gaiman teaches the art of storytelling

I listened to an audiobook version of this class and enjoyed it very much. 4/5 Stars.

War of the Worlds Global Dispatches edited by Kevin J Anderson

I had read most of these stories before but enjoyed re-reading them as well as the new ones.  The fun part, of course, is each talented writer's homage to the style, plotting, voice, and writing of each author to whom the stories are attributed.  Among my favorites is "Night of the Cooters" with the persona of Slim Pickins as a Texas Ranger, which I had read in 1987 in a magazine.  4/5 Stars.