network address translation (NAT)

Dave Anderson takes us on a very-long journey of everything you always wanted to know about NAT but were afraid to ask.  If you are so lucky that you have never had to deal with STUN, ICE, or other NAT issues, congratulations!  Dave's long article is a great tutorial, easy to follow, and comprehensive.

What's the difference between monitoring and observability?

Charity Majors has some (strong) opinions about the differences.  Fundamentally, monitoring is to keep track of known unknowns (1OI or first order of ignorance). Observability is to speed detection, diagnosis, and recovery from unknown unknowns (2OI or second order of ignorance).  She articulates in great detail what all she considers requisite for true observability and creates an awesome wishlist.  I stumbled upon her definition because I was reading Charity's recent article expressing her views on the evolution of the operations role in an organization.

Gate Crashers by Patrick S Tomlinson

Fun, light, hilarious story had me laughing out loud several times. 5/5 Stars.  The silly cardboard characters embrace their own tropiness.

Siddhartha Eine indische Dichtung von Hermann Hesse

Ich habe diese Geschichte genossen. Die Charaktere sind alle bunt und der Dialog ist wunderschön gestaltet. Der Buddhismus wird ohne Proselytisierung dargestellt. 4/5 Sterne

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.