The Freeze-Frame Revolution

I am a huge fan of Peter Watts' "Firefall" series of books (Blindsight and Echopraxia).  I don't like the author's "Rifters" stories nearly as much, despite the author's PhD in the area.  I discovered in my local library that Watts had written another book, Freeze-Frame Revolution in 2018 and added it to my stack.  The book is very thrilling, similar to Poul Anderson's Tao Zero. The characters and plot are similar to the Firefall series.  5/5 Stars.  Now I need to go get the online story fragments and short stories in the Eriophora Sunflower cycle.

There is no attack surface like NO attack surface

Ben Hughes has a funny and insightful blog post about the endless recapitulation of DevSecOps concepts over the last 25 years.  He mentions one of my deep-held beliefs that simplicity and component removal instead of complexity and constant addition are more secure.

The hotness du jour is Distroless (congratulations, you've reinvented using chroot from 1997), where the goal is to have no userland you don't need in the image. For compiled applications like Go, Rust and the likes this is easy as they do/can spit out static binaries so you don't have to worry about libraries (as a whole). They can contain as little as ca-certificates, /etc/passwd , /tmp, and tzdata!% docker inspect gcr.io/distroless/static-debian11 | jq '.[0].Size' | numfmt --to iec --format "%.2f"2.26M

A relatively small 2.26 megabyte container has a much smaller attack surface than the huge containers we normally deploy.  This concept is similar to unikernels and immutable infrastructure for virtual machines.  Unikernels on VMs are more secure and better isolated from their parent and other tenants. However VMs are no longer en vogue. Kubernetes is the answer; what is your problem?

Ben goes on to rant about all the useless poop we cram into our docker images that bloat their size, slow us down in all of our processes & CI/CD pipelines, and contain dozens of security vulnerabilities.  As Elon keeps saying whenever he talks about engineering:  Try very hard to remove objects, components, and features you don't need.

Violence of Action by Jason Anspach & Nick Cole

These Anspach / Cole books in their other universe (forgotten ruin) are starting to grow on me.  I don't normally like high fantasy, even when there is a good magic system.  But the Rangers one-liners and "book of Joe" stuff is enormous fun.  4/5 Stars.

Fugitive Telemetry (Murderbot 6) by Martha Wells

I finally reached the book that won the 2021 Hugo award and the reason I started reading the six-book series.  It's pretty good but I liked some of the earlier books better, 4/5 Stars.

Losing the Nobel Prize by Brian Keating

I saw Dr. Keating's Lex interview and decided to get the book.  The book is gripping and fantastic.  Dr. Keating is a great "popular science" author, bringing the difficult and complex topics of physics and cosmology accurately and simply into layman's terms. The drama and analysis of the Nobel Prize and the new privately funded larger collaborations opposed to the insane competition in science are very-well presented.  5/5 Stars, very highly recommended.

Green Swans by John Elkington

I don't know how this book appeared in my stack but I am severely disappointed. At most 20% of the material makes any sense and there are so many ridiculous, random ideas, I was frequently tempted to put the book down and stop reading. 1/5 Stars.

A Handbook for New Stoics

Not bad, and surprisingly useful.  Pigliucci's interpretation of stoicism is more about mental discipline and less about ethics. 3/5 Stars.

Rationality by Steven Pinker

Great book. Dense, hard-hitting, actionable. 5/5 Stars.

Schilf von Juli Zeh

Ich habe dieses Buch geliebt. Jedes Kapitel ist straff, spannend, Hitchcock-artig. Zehs Stil ist fließend, aber auch elegant sparsam. Sie spielt den Roman im Schwarzwald und ihr beschreibendes Schreiben gibt dem Roman ein Gefühl für die Gegend, ihre saubere, frische Luft und unberührten Gebäude. Die Charaktere sind fantastisch. Die Art und Weise, wie die Physik und die Definition von Zeit in die Handlung eingewoben werden, ist wunderbar. Jetzt muss ich mehr von ihren Büchern finden. 5/5 Sterne.

Mature vs Immature Developers

As a manager, I frequently consider impact, results, peer feedback, artifacts, and other direct, objective information about developers when analyzing their performance.  There is a dimension of seniority that is not easily summarized by these objective measures -- maturity.  I usually summarize observable, behavioral differences by saying things like "the senior developer comes into code you wrote, cleans it up, adds documentation, and fixes your bugs for you; the junior developer files bugs without reading your code and asks you to add capabilities or features that violate the purpose of your design."  But what are the abstract elements and signs of maturity?

My friend recently blogged about an article he came across and generalized that non-developers also display these abstract signs of maturity or immaturity.  I could not agree more.