Buying Time by Joe Haldeman

 

I really enjoyed this one, 5/5 Stars.

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

This sequel to A Memory Called Empire is much better than the first one and was once again nominated for a Hugo award.  The politics are a little more motivated and the first-contact stuff is excellent space opera, 4/5 Stars.

Agile & Lean as simple as possible

I have always found the process of distilling important concepts down to clear, well-understood slogans or sound bites to be very difficult.  Each audience of the idea and each person within the audience has a different context and a different meaning for the words or pictures you are trying to convey.  However, I think my friend Michael has published a clever, unambiguous insight that most of us can understand.  

The entire Agile Manifesto and agile fashion trend is trying to empower developers who are really "the means of intellectual property production and delivery" of an enterprise to execute efficiently and effectively.  Michael has formulated a single question and corollary that can enable anyone to improve.  To paraphrase Michael's single question:

Are you currently, with certainty, working on the single most-important thing you need to do to move your effort towards success?

If yes: good! Carry on!

If no: Is it (a) because you're distracted/impeded or (b) because you don't know what the most important thing is?

In case it's (a): removing the distraction or impediment is now the most important thing [you need to do]. In case it's (b): finding out about the most important thing is now the most important thing [you need to do]. Communication is key in both cases, that's knowing, finding, and involving the right people.

A similar analysis of this idea is in the book The One Thing.

Polity 2: Shadow of the Scorpion by Neal Asher

Fun, mindless space opera.  I intend to read more of the series. 3/5 Stars.

Eversion by Alastair Reynolds

Fantastic story combining awesome steampunk, mystery, rich characters, and fun plot twists.  Great space opera. 5/5 Stars.

Observability fun

After a short hiatus, Charity Majors is publishing fun rants on her blog again.  I always enjoy reading Charity's blog posts.

Why you should pay for your continuous integration system

The folks over at SymOps have published a pretty good, though highly-opinionated summary of the current state of Continuous Integration (CI) systems, including CI-as-a-Service.  They come out very strongly in favor of buying a service and make compelling arguments.  Their post is short and worth a read.

chat ops: yetibot, kibiya, AirBnB

https://yetibot.com/

https://kubiya.ai

AirBnB Writes Their Own:

Everyone associated with incident management hates all of the systems they are forced to use as part of the tracking workflow, with their most vehement, white-hot hatred reserved for Jira.  So everyone tries desperately to avoid Jira any way they can and many on-call folks write or integrate what they label "automation" to push an incident lifecycle through Jira for them.  I perceive one of the secrets of the success of PagerDuty and Slack is their lighter, friendlier, easier methods of implementing an incident workflow and built-in, friendly integrations with ServiceNow and Jira.

About 15,000 internet relay chat (IRC) free, open-source "bots" that have now mostly all become Slack bots are used by service operators to facilitate communication, diagnosis, resolution, and incident workflow data entry via chat.  However, because very few developers can read code and treat each problem they encounter as new, buggy code to be written, more bots are written every day.  AirBnB has published their adventure, writing a slack chatbot that can drive PagerDuty and Jira through a few tasks as a side effect of chatting about incidents.  Their bot has no real automation, but it has a few slack forms to facilitate Jira workflow data entry.  It seems they have only just started developing their bot.

I, personally, know of two very powerful automation platforms based on Slack bots that are worth learning and using. Yetibot is a free, open source shell environment with a rich set of commands, scripting statements, Unix Pipes, etc.  It has fantastic integration with Slack and Jira (among many other systems). If you are looking for a free, powerful chat bot, check out Yetibot.  Another commercial (non-free) chat bot that provides true automation, structured workflow, and extremely safe, powerful built-in modules and interfaces is kubiya. Kubiya provides guided data entry and safe, restricted self-service infrastructure automation workflows in slack.  The coolest part about Kubiya is that it hides many of the details of Terraform, complex policies, and enables a much-more natural way to just "chat" (type at) a system that will guide and assist the human through completing relatively difficult tasks.  For commercial enterprises with overworked service operators, Kubiya is definitely worth evaluating.

Who should write your terraform?

". . .make decisions about where the work goes with your eyes open about what the risks, trade-offs, and systemic preferences of your business are."

Here is a fantastic explanation and history lesson about the evolution and nuances of DevOps, why it is highly contextual, and great guidelines for determining where in your organization you should put the responsibility for "Infrastructure as code" (Terraform) responsibilities.

Expressly Human

Lazy and mediocre research sensationalized. 2/5 Stars.  Not recommended.

Delivery Lead Time, aka code velocity

If you care about software development for operations (DevOps) and the DevOps Research Assessment (DORA) guidelines, you know about the four DORA metrics. Following up on his excellent post about DORA metrics in 2022 earlier this year, Logan Mortimer has written an excellent, deep analysis of Delivery Time that's worth your time to read and understand, especially if you read Accelerate and want to implement DORA matrics in your organization.

In God's Path by Robert Hoyland

I don't know why I subject myself to reading dense, detailed "phone book" history books with too many people and events to keep straight.  The book is a great text book for students and professionals exploring 5th - 7th century accounts from all sides of the rise of the Islamic empire. I had no previous exposure to Persian, Byzantine, or North African history of that era, so it was very enlightening.  And I appreciate the summary at the end describing the survival of non-Arabic languages.  Our common understanding, history, and popular culture was written by the victors and this important book points out some inconvenient facts that are intrinsically interesting.  3/5 Stars, worth the intensity.

The Street Lawyer by John Grisham

Grisham is a master storyteller with wonderful characters and exciting plot twists. 4/5 Stars

Jack Four by Neal Asher

The author's obsession with vivisection as well as the inconsistencies & weaknesses in the magic system (mostly bad science for nanotech in wet chemistry) did not prevent the thriller elements and story elements from being very entertaining and enjoyable. 4/5 Stars.

I feel the earth move under my feet

Personally, I believe everyone in our solar system should settle upon a single time zone, a single time standard, and we should all stop being so provincial in our thinking. The most-adopted and most-popular time standards in communications, networking and computing are Unix Time in the UTC time zone. Unix Time is the number of seconds since Unix was created (on January 1, 1970) and the time zone called universal coordinated time or temps universel coordonné (UTC) is the standard timezone in which almost all computer system clocks are set. Folks in the military sometimes use "zulu" time, consisting of 4 digits and a trailing z, as in "1655z." The time zone "z" is UTC.  The 4 digits are 24-hour HHMM. If we adopt this standard,  eventually we could all drop the "z" and we would all share the meaning of what time it is in 4 digits. Wouldn't that be wonderful?  The main problem with UTC and our time standards is the "leap second."  Recently, the earth recorded its shortest day ever because earth's geographical poles (not the magnetic poles) moved so quickly. Normally earth's rotation is sped up by tides or earthquakes (tectonic shifts). Leap seconds were invented to add or subtract a second from UTC time to account for these changes in earth's rotation.  What a clumsy hack!

There is a much-better standard than UTC, proposed in the 1970's and created by a now-defunct department of the French government (whose officials were called seigneurs du temps or time lords). The standard can keep track of the number of attoseconds since the big bang formation of the universe in our local general relativistic sphere.  The standard is called International Atomic Time or temps atomique international (TAI). But very few of us bother to install the code libraries and use TAI for our logging timestamps or other purposes because people are lazy; they find it inconvenient to convert to and from the standard Unix Time in UTC that is used in the rest of our software and conventions.  But think about it: Time Lords!  C'mon man.  Conversions are not that hard.

Now Meta (Facebook) has joined the anti-leap second fray.  The discussions in Dubai next year should be interesting.

Hommage to Carol King for the title of this post.