Best Practices Cult

(Cargo Cult practice)

Michael Haupt has pointed us at a great blog post about how software development organizations frequently slip into behaviors driven by the logical fallacy post hoc ergo propter hoc (that follows this, therefore this causes that), or more colloquially "cargo cult" practices. DomK goes into detail about how many organizations blindly follow "Best Practices," without ever questioning if there could be better approaches that are much better or evolving these practices over time.  And Michael links to an example.

 I posted about this antipattern with respect to agile practices in 2014. Michael's summary and advice are actually better and more general.  Focus on the success measures of the mission and be prepared to change your practices when they are no longer optimal.  "The nines don't matter if your customers are unhappy."  Keep looking for how to get better at accomplishing your mission and don't assume "best practices" are "best" for your team.  Improve, continuously.

OpenTelemetry gains momentum

This article explains how to use the opentelemtry framework to provide tracing through a service-based system, and also details how to send custom context for anything.  Examples are sharding, localisation, feature flags, & experimentation.  If a customer's end-to-end experience travels through 27 services (not uncommon), this framework preserves all contexts needed from all 27 services to diagnose anomalies or failures very quickly.

Making Kubernetes more reliable

Tamy Bryant Butow wrote this fantastic and detailed article on SRE for k8s.  Highly recommended!  If you run infrastructure and your customers are unhappy with your k8s services because of outages and failures, her approach to solving these problems is exactly what you need.

Simple Service Level Indicator implementation

Why are formulating service level objectives and their associated measurements (service level indicators) so difficult?  Xabier Larrakoetxea has released a framework  he calls "SLOth" that collapses the two (SLO & SLI) into a very-simple Prometheus based framework.    His examples are interesting and I shall eventually implement the home Internet SLI measurement as part of my own home Internet monitor (username: guest password: guest).

The measurement of customer satisfaction for home internet from the customer's perspective is that service is available during waking hours with very-few service interruptions.  Customers need the service to be low latency, and have low jitter.  Note that customers don't care about the bogus red herring measurement of  "bandwidth."  Video conferencing will work just fine on a consistent, low-latency 2 Mbit/sec service.  If you have lots of people in your home doing high-bandwidth or low-latency (interactive) work / play, you'll need more bandwidth, obviously.

counting bugs & service incidents is an antipattern

Here is another reminder that counting service incidents or bugs and using bug counts is usually a bad idea.  As Charity said: The nines don't matter when customers are unhappy.  Service level objectives and their indicators (measurements) must map to customer delight & pain.  As Ryan Kitchens has pointed out several times, the true support of a post-incident retrospective is how many people read and find the report valuable and how much everyone  learns from the incident.

Level Five by William Ledbetter

I listened to this one during a 10-mile hike.  It has a fantastic setting!  However, the science is not very good, the story is over-complicated, the AI's are much too anthropomorphic and there are too many cyber-security plot contrivances. I was still willing to suspend disbelief and enjoyed it, 4/5 Stars.

The Outsider by Stephen King

Stephen King is one of the best writers of our time.  He writes extremely well-crafted literature.  However he writes in a genre I hate -- horror.  None-the-less, when I feel the need to read engaging, well-written literature, Stephen King is one of my defaults.  This book has great characters and I did not find it scary, 4/5 Stars.

Haze by L. E. Modesitt Jr

18th and 19th century science fiction was called "utopian literature," at least in German.  This story harkens back to that time, using futuristic sci-fi settings to illustrate the author's ideas for a utopian society.  It's not bad and it is well crafted, but the characters, the universe, and the story not really good, either. 3/5 Stars.  I shall probably read the next one anyway.

Apple adds identity cards to Apple Wallet in iOS15

Apple adds identity cards to Apple Wallet.  Apple says TSA is working to enable checkpoints as the first place people can show this digital ID.  https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E3S-XG1WEAEA19o.jpg

Gefährliche Täuschung von Sabine Kornbichler

Ich wurde tief in diese Geschichte hineingezogen und konnte das Buch nicht aus der Hand legen. Die Wendungen und Komplexitäten der Handlung sind manchmal schwer zu verstehen, aber am Ende stimmen alle Fakten überein. 5/5 Sterne.

Win by Harlan Coben

The situations and characters are a little over-the-top contrived but the plot is fun, and the writing is up to Coben's standard, 3/5 Stars.