Uncanny Valley by Anna Wiener

For my birthday this year, I received a hardback copy of this excellent, well-written memoir. If you live in San Francisco or are otherwise in the SF Bay area and part of the tech industry, this book is a must-read.  5/5 Stars.

Randomize by Andy Weir

I make earnest efforts to avoid the evil retail giant's (ERG's) pervasive, monopolistic,  ecosystems;  I always look for online and retail alternatives.  I try not to stream their online content and always look for an alternative cloud computing provider.  Other members of my household, however, have subscribed to their annual, expensive, "free shipping club" service that includes a large and growing number of benefits and perquisites.  Among the benefits is some free ebook content and I saw this Andy Weir story was available free.  The story is quite good but a little bit too short.  Hints about the characters and plot arc were a little too dense and the ideas were big enough to expand into at least novella length.  I enjoyed it and can't wait to try more of the perquisites from the ERG (sigh).  5/5 Stars

the meaning of it all by Richard Feynman

I am a big fan of Richard Feynman.  It's wonderful to read more of his fun essays.  5/5 Stars.  Too short, as always.

Stories of your life and others by Ted Chiang

Fantastic collection of short stories, 5/5 Stars.

Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh

I never read Cherryh's books during the golden years of science fiction (when the reader is 14-18).  But a few folks recommended I catch up on a few of the better works.  This story is a little too long for one book, and a little repetitive.  But the concepts, politics, and psychology are very interesting. 3/5 Stars.

What is "observability?"

Adri V has a very-approachable write-up to the modern concept of DevOps "observability" that has supplanted "monitoring," "tracing," & "logging" in modern software design.

yet another no-code workflow automator: n8n

https://n8n.io/ has a visual (no code) editor for connecting services together (does anyone remember Yahoo! Pipes from 2007?).  n8n enables mashing up and triggering from over 200 services including Google Sheets, JIRA, github, GraphQL, and your own RESTful services.  Check out the self-hosted freeware version in github.

checklist for your alerts

Every happy alerting setup is the same; each unhappy alerting setup is unreliable in its own way (not Tolstoy).  Mario Fernandez walks us through a brief analysis and simple checklist to help us fix our unique alerting issues.

Elegant solution to "the thundering herd" problem while warming up a cache

The developers at Reddit posted a simple, elegant solution to their (relatively common) ramping problem of handling many tens of thousands of simultaneous requests while warming up a high-level cache. I am embarrassed to admit I had never heard of gevent before but assumed there was something like it powering Reddit, as it is written in Python..

Team Topologies

Hot on the heels of the 2021 State of DevOps report is an analysis (and sales pitch) for Team Topologies) to break through the cultural barriers holding most teams back from reaping the benefits of embracing DevOps.