Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro

I did not like this story, the characters, or the writing that much, 2/5 Stars.

The Naked God by Peter F Hamilton

The story-telling and writing are great but the science and contrivances are terrible, 3/5 stars.

The Interstellar Ramjet concept is 60 years old

(Robert Bussard in 1959 with his Astronutica Acta issue)

Here is a wonderful history of our theoretical investigations into interstellar travel using the interstellar medium itself (Hydrogen) for fuel.  About twenty years ago, I personally was discussing the limits of such travel with my oldest son. As you know, some regions of interstellar space contain too little hydrogen to fuel a Bussard ramjet. My son suggested sending several "tanker ships" ahead of the main passenger liner to gather hydrogen from adjacent regions and leave the h2 in the path of the passenger liner.  I don't think this concept was ever published in the modern resurgence of academic study and I am too lazy to write up the math.

Interestingly, Bussard himself mentioned the use of an extremely-large magnet field for the ram scoop but is usually not credited.

The ONE Thing by Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan

The voice, tone, empty bromides, and vapid aphorisms, especially in the first few chapters were very nauseating and I almost put the book down a few times.  However, one of my mentors recommended the book, so I felt obligated to get through it and the book did get better.  In a nutshell, as the title suggests, the book prescribes why and how to prioritize a single task, and  engage in that task with a singular focus.  The authors' innate values, intensity and driven personality shine through.  They assume everyone and all readers are megalomaniacal and driven to amass wealth, power, fame. The concepts and prescriptive recommendations in the book are actually very good and I do recommend the book.  For example, the time management recommendations and approaches to expanding your horizons are modern and treated poorly by other self-help authors.  3/5 Stars.  One of the top 100 business books you should read. 

Great talk on Chaos Engineering or DevSecOps

Aaron Rinehart takes us on a wonderful journey through Complexity, Testing in Production, and the advantages of Chaos Engineering for DevSecOps.  Don't miss this great talk.

The Neutronium Alchemist by

A great space opera thriller with terrible physics, 4/5 Stars.

Opinions!!

Everyone is very angry.  I was looking for data and peer reviewed academic publications but they are difficult to sift through.  This August 2019 study has almost no conclusions other than we don't gather enough data, But many journalists are citing that study to lend evidence to their own opinions. As Pinker keeps reminding us, the total number of urban fatal shootings keeps declining every year:

But this week we had car-b-q's, property damage, and theft, even in my sleepy little town.

Checklists are good

I am a fan of Atul Gawande's book and frequently try to use checklists for work-related activities. If you are trying to formulate a "launch readiness" checklist for your approval or release workflow for your backend applications, Aleksi Kornev's checklist is a good place to start.

Rejoiner Revisited

Google is seriously backing their GraphQL middleware (Rejoiner).  Kris Sandoval takes us on a quick overview of why it is so appealing and cases where trying to use it are inappropriate (expensive database calls).

GitOps deployment pipelines explosion

It seems everyone and her uncle is jumping on the GitOps bandwagon to deploy continuously.  Omer Kahani explains in his write-up how his company (Riskified) uses Argos continuous deployment in their pipeline.