Arkship trilogy 2, The Captain's Daughter by Peter F Hamilton

An audible exclusive.  I am very disappointed in the characters, plot, science, and writing. I don't care about the characters.  The conflict is embarrassingly poorly conceived.  1/5 Stars.  I shall likely not read or listen to the last one.

Eight good principles & associated patterns for service reliability and targeted observability

Jason Smale at Zendesk has a nice write-up of his team's eight principles they distilled from the evolution of their reliability journey.  The first principle is another repetition of Charity Major's  "the nines don't matter if your customers can't use your service."  

Read the whole thing.

Nova by Samuel R Delany (1968)

I saw a reference to this book and got the ebook version.  3 pages in, I realized I had read it in 1969 (when it won the Hugo award) and I remembered all the details and the entire story.  I skimmed through the rest of the ebook in a few minutes and noticed the new edition had added  a few paragraphs the author had originally written containing a rant by the antagonist to make him more evil.  I think the original is a little better.  Despite the outdated physics and odd occult mumbo jumbo, the book still holds up, 3/5 Stars.

Deutschland 2050: Wie der Klimawandel unser Leben verändern wird von Nick Reimer und Toralf Staud

Dieses Buch ist ziemlich lang – 400 Seiten. Jeder Abschnitt erklärt sein Thema ausführlich. Die Autoren gehen jedoch implizit davon aus, dass sich unsere Technologie nicht ändern wird. Eine weitere implizite Annahme ist, dass keine Bemühungen zur Abwendung der Klimakatastrophe Wirkung zeigen werden. Diese zweite Annahme ist wahrscheinlich wahr, aber die erste Annahme ist mit ziemlicher Sicherheit nicht wahr. Das Buch ist sehr informativ und erklärt unser Verständnis besser als das Buch von Bill Gates. Allerdings fand ich es an manchen Stellen langweilig. 3/5 Sterne.

Wayard Galaxy 3 by Jason Anspach & J. N. Chaney

The authors have said in an interview that they enjoy writing in this branch of their metaverse because of the "Brody" character.  Brody's dialog and rants make this entire book worth reading. I thought Brody was a little over-the-top and silly in the first two books, but he/it has grown on me. 4/5 Stars.

The Sins of our Fathers by James S A Corey

When a professional writer is confused or blocked because she has not developed her character deeply enough in her own mind to write about how her character will react or behave in specific plot situations, she will sometimes write little vignette stories from her character's past to help her develop the character in her own mind.  And, other elements of a book such as B-plot side actions that flesh out a timeline are cut by the editor so fans never get to enjoy them. Both of these unpublished materials are sometimes expanded and completed after a book becomes popular into a complete short story or novella.  The novellas and short stories of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck (pen name "James S. A. Corey") appear to me to be from that slush pile of cut material.  This novella centers on Naomi Nagata's son Filip and takes place after the end of the series.  The societal, ethical, and sociological themes are well-written. 5/5 Stars.

The Kaiju preservation society

I love all of Scalzi's books, especially the cynical, over-the-top sarcastic comedies.  The tropes in this one were a little too predictable and melodramatic, but the dialog was fantastic, 4/5 Stars.

One Data Engineering Team's Observability journey

Here is an interesting story that is near-and-dear to my heart:  A small data engineering team crafted their systems for modest scale and then suddenly had to deal with hypergrowth.  Glossing over their early miscues, Ricardo  Souza has a good write-up of the elegant methods they are using now.

Again: There is no attack surface as good as NO attack surface

Here is another reminder about why simple base images are more secure.  The new word for smaller, simpler, more secure base images is "quiet" because they flag fewer false positives in security scanners, are easier to maintain, and typically contain fewer security flaws.

In software & information security, as in software design, simplicity is paramount.  Whenever I read criticisms of microkernels or minimal docker images that do not separate kernel from user space with enough security layers or "security issues" in tiny distros that don't do enough to assure UID 0 separation from unprivileged UIDs, I shake my head.  If your docker container has a remote execution exploit such that bad actors can use all of its resources to access and launch further attacks, none of these "security vulnerabilities" matters.  Even the workhorse 106KB small 300+ commands BusyBox that I personally use frequently can be secured.  In real estate your top three priorities are "Location, location, location." In software design and in software security, the top three priorities are: "Simplify, simplify, simplify."

Better Outline of New Hire Documentation for Developers

Wow!  This "Reverse Onboarding" (as my buddy called it) list of 20 questions a developer should ask when she joins a new team is a fantastic outline for new-hire onboarding and a great, prioritized checklist for getting settled into a new team.