ship's log (Alliance book 1) by Lawrence P White

The writing (editing, really), characters, and story line are not bad and the premise has some merit. But the science and politics are so awful and the magic system is so inconsistent, I am not going to pursue the series and almost stopped reading. 1/5 Stars.

Hatching the Phoenix by Frederik Pohl (1999)

I had read this one before and realized I knew the ending about half way through; I got a little more out of it this time because it was a blatant reminder of how much global societal values have shifted away from self-reliance, individual responsibility towards our current ideas that value a totalitarian nanny state and entitlements.  3/5 Stars, probably not worth reading twice.

continuous integration build times

Kelly Sutton takes us on a fantastic journey of how to think about and details of how to optimize your continuous integration (CI) build times. Interestingly and counter-intuitively they concentrated on 99th percentile build times instead of 75th or, shudder, 50th percentile time.  Why?  Because a very-slow build constipates the pipeline, disrupting everyone.  Lots of other insights in the post; it is worth your time to skim the whole thing.

Positive Results: Time to Sell Gilead (GIL) stock?

The New England Journal of Medicine (I love their studies) has published some extremely good news for Gilead's Remdesivir.  Among the interesting results from the study is that the Chinese researchers lied. Remdesivir shortened a patient's time to recovery compared to the placebo group, from an average of 15 days to 11 days. Improvements occurred whether or not the patient was receiving supplemental oxygen. What's more, the data lays to rest any worries that remdesivir has to be given very early after the onset of symptoms. In fact, those participants who entered the trial more than 10 days after the onset of symptoms actually showed a better response to remdesivir than those who started being treated during the first 10 days!

Foundations of Behavioral Economics' Cognitive Bias confirmed

Prospect Theory from the 1979 paper has been confirmed with a comprehensive n=4098 study.

All of our computer hardware is riddled with exploits

I stumbled across this devastating exposé of the hardware we use every day and it is extremely depressing.  All of our hardware contains massive exploits and is surveilling us; and the evil big-government and big-business entities are adding more and more exploits that enable their enemies and common criminals to succeed in attacking us.  I am seriously considering switching to a ChromeBook.

even more good news about our genocidal war against SARS-CoV-2

A company called "Moderna" has announced findings from their first study, that their vaccine likely works.  Also (today), a study was published claiming the immune systems of people who were infected have changed SARS-CoV-2's genome but we don't know what that means yet.

Compliance as Code in Terraform: behavior driven development (BDD)

Check out terraform-compliance on github and the author's slideshare presentation.  Very slick.  It concentrates on negative tests using behavior driven development (BDD) testing.

Helm 3: simplifying secrets

Helm is still clunky, young, and lacks most functionality we need from package managers.  But Kubernetes is bizarre and difficult, so we can't blame Helm for its slow evolution.  Helm v3 now has a fantastically elegant way to create and managing secrets that is very safe and easy to use.  This very-short tutorial is worth 3 minutes of your time.

DevSecOp: Information Security concepts

The rapid evolution, sophistication, economics, and political implications of "cyber" -- organized attacks against computing systems -- is forcing more DevOps specialists to branch into DevSecOps and InfoSec.

The folks at SpecterOps (Jared Atkinson) take us on this worthwhile three-part journey through a simple and clear way to conceptualize your defenses:

https://posts.specterops.io/capability-abstraction-fbeaeeb26384
https://posts.specterops.io/detection-spectrum-198a0bfb9302
https://posts.specterops.io/detection-in-depth-a2392b3a7e94