The dead mountaineer's inn by Borris & Arkady Strugatsky

I enjoyed this book much more than the roadside picnic. 4/5 Stars.

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

I enjoyed this one.  The Mayan human sacrifice and death myths were well-crafted into a consistent magic system with great characters and a fun story. 3/5 Stars

Some Assembly Required - Decoding four billion years of life from ancient fossils to DNA by Neil Shubin

Taking a break from "lit rut shore" that I do not appreciate, I picked up another popular biology book from my queue and enjoyed this fun ride through recent, counter-intuitive findings in our current understanding of the origins and evolution in biology. 4/5 Stars.

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

I stopped reading because the main character and "dignity" concept were so abhorrent.  Quiet desperation, indeed. Yuck, 1/5 Stars.    Ishiguro gets one last chance with Never Let me go and then I give up.

Serverless is not optimal for every problem

Over at Ingenious, Gabe Chertok makes some great arguments about why the inevitable NoOps Serverless future is still not yet ready for many applications and has some more maturing to do.  Among his strong reasons is inconsistency among components.  Read the whole thing.

Unfinished Code Delivery

Gandalf published another fun IISM.org article about what I call below-minimum viable software that we ship because of date pressure.  Gandalf calls it unfinished code. Enjoy.

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.