A memory called Empire by Arkady Martine

Odd politics, good story and terrible science 1/5 Stars.  I nearly stopped reading it three times.

Otherness by David Brin

I had previously read all of the stories from their earlier collections but I had not read all of the essays and I enjoyed re-reading some of the stories for the timeliness of their concepts in the current times where shadows are cast on our societal progress towards enlightenment.  4/5 Stars.  David is always fun to read but the depth and implications cause the reading to be slow.

DevSecCon24 videos

Videos from the 24-hour, three-location DevSecOps conference DevSecCon24 are now available online.  The keynotes are bad but there are some good talks in there.

Hierarchy of needs for developers who use a "platform"

Matt Prince at CloudFlare has published this deeply insightful blog entry about what makes cloud platforms successful as measured by developer adoption and engagement.  Matt believes that the original purpose of his platform (speed) is not at all what caused the platform to be successful and is betting the future of his "Cloud Workers" platform on this hierarchy of needs:

Compliance is extremely important.  In my day job, we must use a platform that, interestingly, has almost no appeal to folks outside the company.

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Top 5 books I have read this year.  Fantastic story, characters, descriptions, 5/5 Stars.

Checkov scanner and Terraform Security

Bridgecrew, the company that sells a commercial version of the free checkov Infrastructure as code security scanner, has published this interesting "be afraid!" report about all the vulnerabilities they have detected in public terraform code.  It's worth skimming.

Design Docs

Malte Ubl (inventor of accelerated mobile pages -- AMP) at Google published the guidelines he uses at Google for design documents.  It's interesting because of the expectations authors have on the readers of the document that are very different from the practices where I work.

The Last Theorem by Frederik Pohl & Arthur C Clarke

I read this one when it came out in 2008 and did not remember the space alien plot (it is forgettable). It is no better this time, 2/5 Stars.  Meh.

operational incidents: management prevents learning

John Allspaw presents two years of learning from the field, exposing interesting anti-patterns and common practices that prevent learning.  It's definitely worth skimming.

https://speakerdeck.com/jallspaw/findings-from-the-field-devops-enterprise-london-2020

The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault

I read this book in the late 1960s when I was reading Renault's Arthurian works and did not like it then.  It was no better this time.  1/5 Stars. Disrecommend.