Oblivion (Starfire, book 8) by Steve White & Charles Gannon

It's a good ending to the series, tying up all the loose ends after a long, non-stop series of space battles.  I had to put the series down as it got too repetitive.  Despite the hackneyed overused tropes, the space opera is ok, 3/5 Stars.

Code Breaker buy Walter Isaacson

I think Brian Keating's Losing the Nobel Prize is slightly better. But this Jennifer Doudna story is pretty good.  I finished reading the book a few days before the patent office's final ruling on whose patent takes precedence for applications of CRISPR Cas9 for human gene editing (Doudna lost).  And I had no idea about the Biohackers who are editing their own genes.  The competition and races for her discoveries are fun, but the entire second half of the book, examining bio ethics, is a little boring.  It's still entertaining and fun, 5/5 Stars.

10 Principles for Growth as an Engineer

Today at work, someone pointed me at Dan Heller's blog post from a few years ago about how to be successful as an engineer.  They are:

1. Reason about business value
2. Unblock yourself
3. Take initiative
4. Improve your writing
5. Own your own project management
6. Own your education
7. Master your tools
8. Communicate proactively
9. Seek and exploit opportunities to collaborate
10. Be professional and reliable.

It's worth spending 3 minutes to read the whole article.

And the concepts are reminiscent of Elon's 5 Rules for Engineering.

Crashing Heaven by Al Robertson

It took a while to assimilate the magic system and all the odd characters but this cyberpunk world is fun and the characters were great. I plan to read more books in the "Station" series by this author. 4/5 Stars

War Dogs by Greg Bear

I normally don't like Greg Bear books because they are so "way way out" that I find it very difficult to assemble the universes he creates.  But this one is relatively straightforward with a very-deep mystery that gets deeper.  I had a theory about the relationship between the gurus, antags, and Mars structure in the story early on that was the right guess for the final reveal. 3/5 Stars.  I may read the next one.

Mitch joins Lessen as VP Engineering

I am extremely grateful and happy to announce I have joined Lessen as VP Engineering.  I am eager to learn, grow, and help revolutionize property management. Thank you Chris Bee, Ashley White, and everyone on the Lessen team with whom I have connected.

I am hiring. #hiring

Momo von Michael Ende

Ein wunderbares Märchen über ein junges Mädchen, das die Superkraft hat, anderen aufmerksam zuhören zu können, und das den Wert von Zeit mit anderen und Geduld verstehen kann. Sie schließt starke Freundschaften mit Menschen. Mit ihrer Freundin Kassiopeia und der Hilfe von Herrn "Sekundus Minutus Hora" nimmt sie es mit den "Grauen Männern" – den Meistern der Effizienz – auf, die allen die wertvolle zwischenmenschliche Zeit gestohlen haben. Spass, 4/5 Sterne.

shade California's aqueducts with solar power

According to this interesting pilot and proposal, the drought-stricken state could save 63 billion gallons of water from evaporation by adding some shade.  So why not generate 13 Gigawatts of power at the same time?  It's a win-win-win and a great step towards renewable energy.

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.