SQLite databases on static web sites such as github.io

This capability and technology is very cool!

Pyston v2.2 is 30% faster

Pyston v2.2 was released.  It appears to be gaining momentum.

Pixie Observability framework on the extended Berkeley Packet Framework

Building on the what-you-need-only-when-you-need-it concept of Mantis, Pixie enables you to create "Pixie Edge Modules" (PEMs).  PEMs are full body request traces (via eBPF); or PEMs can be system metrics or K8s events.  There is no need for any code-changes because Pixie runs underneath your containers, services, and applications; Pixie guarantees less than 5% overhead. Custom metrics, traces & logs can be integrated into Pixie Command Module (PCMs) for your own, arbitrary traces or metrics.  The PCMs run in your K8s cluster and are operated by command line.  It's a much-richer observability platform than a mesh.  Let's see if the concept takes off.

Displaying measurements in dashboards

I recently stumbled across this insightful and detailed advice for user experience design of dashboard displays.  Grafana appears to take many of these guidelines into account when it creates default dashboards from my time series data but I have noticed most engineers make their dashboards much too complex by default.

Kubecon-EU 2021 redux

In previous years, my company sent folks to Kubecon & Kubecon-EU almost since the conferences started.  However, this year I was unable to find any read-outs or trip reports internally, and I had no budget allocated to pay for my folks to go, so I retreated to others' public write-ups online.  Danny Bryant wrote this one. His summary is not bad.  Dany's key take-aways: Developers, and developer experience, within public cloud is a big deal; End users are making a big impact in the cloud native world right now; Networking in the cloud and K8s are is still evolving and unstable; Open standards are providing key abstractions, extensibility, and innovation; Control planes are where the most end user value is being created; Anyone can (and should) contribute to the community: docs are a great place to start.

Rich Burroughs wrote this longer write-up with more-detailed summaries of the talks.

Why are all CEOs of trillion dollar companies originally software engineers?

  

The International Institute of Software Management (iism.org) features a relatively long but worthwhile analysis of why there are so many successful CEOs who were developers. and guidance for leaders who started out as developers for applying their skills to wealth creation and success.

(All of the links in this post were removed because Google claims they violate the reader's privacy. You will need to duckduckgo search for the iism article.)

Fwd: Better Code Review Practices

  I recently reminded folks at work that it sometimes helps to look back at the issues we put into our code in the last 3-9 months.  We can formulate a short (3-5 item)  bullet list in a checklist.  The list is the 3-5 most-frequent types of errors we made in the recent past. The checklist reminds us during code reviews  to look for the same type of bug in  new code while we  are reviewing the new code.  Of course, the checklist must change, so there is effort in re-reviewing the last 3 months of bugs 4x per year and updating the checklist.  If all the bugs we put in are unique and there are no visible patterns, this effort is not worth doing. This idea comes from Steve McConnell's book Code Complete.  He calls the process "checklist driven code reviews" and he published a (long) list of common patterns of issues as examples.  Steve's book and approaches are quite old and modern integrated experiences and tools enable more, better refactoring, as well as some new difficulties for reviewers.

Over the weekend, I stumbled upon this interesting post from Mike Lynch with very-useful advice for how you should formulate your pull requests so that reviewers can more-easily review your code.

(All links in this post were removed because Google claims they violate the readers's privacy.  You will need to duckduckgo search for the book, the checklist, and Mike Lynch's blog post about formulating pull requests for code review.)

augmenting our bodies

In his first book, More than Human in 2010, our buddy Mez took us on some great thought experiments about the promise of brain-enhancing drugs and body-enhancing prosthetic devices such as exoskeletal limbs.  We are starting to see early prototypes of concepts beyond simple enhancements and towards additional functionality.  The third thumb project is one example.

Do YOUR Job first

Charity Majors posted some more good career advice in her blog on 2021-03-07.  It's about focus and getting YOUR job done first, before you get distracted by all the other important work that is peripheral to the mission and purpose of your own job.   Many of us are attracted to shiny, new objects and are easily distracted.  Other folks are opportunistically looking to gain credit or glory unrelated to their job.

In 2016, on their way to their fifth (and best) super bowl championship, the New England Patriots cut one of the best players and athletes on their team, Jaime Collins.  Collins is a fantastic player.  Why was he cut?  To function effectively and win as a team, each person must do her own job first. Do YOUR job.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

Fantastic story, amazing history, gripping, dense with aphorisms and life lessons, rich, colorful characters, 5/5 Stars, one of the 3 best books I have read this year, highly recommended.  Thank you, Senthil.