the meaning of it all by Richard Feynman

I am a big fan of Richard Feynman.  It's wonderful to read more of his fun essays.  5/5 Stars.  Too short, as always.

Stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang

Fantastic collection of short stories, 5/5 Stars.

Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh

I never read Cherryh's books during the golden years of science fiction (when the reader is 14-18).  But a few folks recommended I catch up on a few of the better works.  This story is a little too long for one book, and a little repetitive.  But the concepts, politics, and psychology are very interesting. 3/5 Stars.

What is "observability?"

Adri V has a very-approachable write-up to the modern concept of DevOps "observability" that has supplanted "monitoring," "tracing," & "logging" in modern software design.

yet another no-code workflow automator: n8n

https://n8n.io/ has a visual (no code) editor for connecting services together (does anyone remember Yahoo! Pipes from 2007?).  n8n enables mashing up and triggering from over 200 services including Google Sheets, JIRA, github, GraphQL, and your own RESTful services.  Check out the self-hosted freeware version in github.

checklist for your alerts

Every happy alerting setup is the same; each unhappy alerting setup is unreliable in its own way (not Tolstoy).  Mario Fernandez walks us through a brief analysis and simple checklist to help us fix our unique alerting issues.

Elegant solution to "the thundering herd" problem while warming up a cache

The developers at Reddit posted a simple, elegant solution to their (relatively common) ramping problem of handling many tens of thousands of simultaneous requests while warming up a high-level cache. I am embarrassed to admit I had never heard of gevent before but assumed there was something like it powering Reddit, as it is written in Python..

Team Topologies

Hot on the heels of the 2021 State of DevOps report is an analysis (and sales pitch) for Team Topologies) to break through the cultural barriers holding most teams back from reaping the benefits of embracing DevOps.

State of DevOps: stuck in the middle with you

The 2021 "State of DevOps Report" is out early this year with great insights about cultural blockers among the 40K professionals who responded.

Hit & Fade, Forgotten Ruin book 2 by Jason Anspach & Nick Cole

Lots of fun as the story continues, 4/5 Stars.  Can't wait for the next one.

E-Day by Nicholas Sansbury Smith

Puke awful terrible, 0/5 Stars.  I put it down after a few dozen pages.

Openness and Employee Engagement

Limeade has published a study that aligns to my introspective value of openness and transparency.  It's always a great feeling to find data that agrees with your opinions.  Of course it is much better to seek out and find data that can help changes your opinions. . .

A new approach to working with legacy software by the ThoughtWorks team

The ThoughtWorks folks frequently publish great insights into software development.  I always enjoy Martin Fowler's books and articles.  I came across this cool article on working with legacy code holistically.  It touches on many critically important but frequently overlooked factors such as culture, team composition, and and great objective key results (OKRs).  If you work in software, this article is worth reading.

Forgotten Ruin by Jason Anspach, Nick Cole

Sometimes "tech meets magic" is cool.  I enjoyed this one. 4/5 Stars.

Escape Attempt by Arkady & Boris Strugatsky

The stories are all very entertaining and very thought provoking.  I still have trouble with "unreliable narrator" and always reading between the lines, but I did enjoy this collection.  3/5 Stars.

A hold in the sky - arkship trilogy book 1 by Peter F Hamilton and Elizabeth Kleft

Not good. Terrible pacing, gaping plot holes, ridiculous motivations, 1/5 Stars.

Galaxy's Edge Book 11 Legacies by Nick Cole & Jason Anspach

Season Two kicks off with a fun, new story in the "Galaxy's Edge" universe.  Cool new story features with a few more clues about the mysterious, hidden, powerful entities behind controlling politics in the galaxy, 4/5 Stars.