Bazel, github shell action, and immutable infrastructure

Filip Nikolovski writes up how he tuned the performance of his Bazel continuous integration (CI) pipeline.  It's interesting that the newest and best containerized systems still fall into terribly inefficient execution patterns unless we manually tune them.

What do our "isolation" attempts do to the spread of COVID-19?

As I speculated from the variables in the equation, isolation prolongs the pandemic by several weeks -- it slows the spread but does not stop it.  We hope it drastically decreases the amplitude, assuming isolation continues for several weeks.

Also in the 2020-03-10 COVID-19 update on ArsTech:  

"public health experts were critical of the moves, calling some of them draconian and ineffective. For instance, quarantines, which can clumsily round up the sick with the healthy, may not prevent the spread of disease—which we certainly saw on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, quarantined in Japan. And travel restrictions in our highly-connected world are inevitably leaky."

". . .a new non-peer-reviewed, unpublished study, an international team of researchers estimated that without the measures, the number of cases in mainland China would have been 67-times higher. And if officials had begun implementing them just one week earlier, cases could have been reduced by 66 percent. If they had implemented them three weeks earlier, cases would have been reduced by 95 percent.

". . . in a Twitter thread March 10, one of the coauthors of that study, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, noted that as community spread increases, social distancing—however painful—becomes essential to slowing and minimizing the impact."

Brennendes Geheimnis von Stefan Zweig

Ich habe diesen Roman wirklich genossen. Die Geschichte ist einfach, aber die Psychologie ist zeitlos. 5/5 Sterne.

Great North Road by Peter F Hamilton

Really fantastic story and great "space opera" awe, wonder, 5/5 stars.

Star maker by Olaf Stapledon

Very good!  Dated by the cosmology understanding of the time (100 years ago) but it stands up nonetheless.  4/5 stars.  Deserves all the accolades it gets.

The Annals of the Heechee by Frederik Pohl

Really good, 5/5 stars.  I shall read the earlier stories.

Heechee Chronicles by Frederik Pohl

Fantastic, 5/5 stars.  Now I must go back and read the first three.

Kotlin domain specific language (DSL) instead of YAML

This codetalk video by Fedor Korotkov is another alternative to copy/pasting large YAML files.  Here, Fedor shows how to use kotlin instead of bash, javascript, or go.

Too much copy/pasted YAML

Daniele Polencic tells us how and why we should use templating tools like yq and kustomize to template our YAML with real code instead of trying to shoehorn our kubernetes configurations into Helm charts.  We are still in early days of abstracting, factoring, and choosing dynamic configuration policies for kubernetes.  Therefore picking and using one or another of the templating and customization frameworks is your own decision.  Use the tools and programming language you prefer but stop copy/pasting!

Amazon's passion for operational excellence

Adrian Hornsby, an Amazon architecture evangelist (whatever that means)  is writing a long, three-part blog post espousing his views on operational excellence.  He does not touch on architecture principles or design for operability such as recovery-orientation or redundancy but he does have some good insights into high-level policies and tools for operations.