Fake it til you almost make it or really going fast

Shipping pressure and throw-away "proof of concept" demonstrations very frequently lead to spectacular failures. My buddy recently re-posted an analysis and link to John Cutler's insightful twitter content associated with "feeling like we are going fast" versus really increasing true value delivery velocity.  It's worth a quick 2-min read.  

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Note: I think Michael's comment about the origin of the expression "jedem Anfang wohnt ein Zauber inne" (there's magic in every beginning) that he credits to Hermann Hesse should be attributed to a mistranslation into English of an 1808 edition of  "Faust: eine Tragödie"  by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

Was heute nicht geschieht, ist morgen nicht getan,
Und keinen Tag soll man verpassen,
Das Mögliche soll der Entschluß
Beherzt sogleich beim Schopfe fassen,
Er will es dann nicht fahren lassen,
Und wirket weiter, weil er muß.

The texture, meter, and rhyme are fun, right?  Goethe can be soothing to read.

The common (terrible mistranslation into an) English version is:

What you can do, or dream you can, begin it,
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Only engage, and then the mind grows heated, —
Begin it, and the work will be completed!

It is a common inspirational quote I see floating around the interwebs from time to time.

Glass House by Brian Alexander

After making the mistake of reading Things Are Never So Bad That They Can't Get Worse

Inside the Collapse of Venezuela, I doubled down on depressing myself by reading another tear-jerker story about the death spiral of a small town in Ohio called Lancaster.  The long, excruciatingly depressing story is summarized  at the end by the author:

"Corporate elites said they needed free-trade agreements, so they got them. Manufacturers said that they needed tax breaks and public-money incentives in order to keep their plants operating in the United States, so they got them. Banks and financiers needed looser regulations, so they got them. Employers said they needed weaker unions–or no unions at all–so they got them. Private equity firms said they needed carried interest and secrecy, so they got them. Everybody, including Lancastrians themselves, said they needed lower taxes, so they got them. What did Lancaster and a hundred other towns like it get? Job losses, slashed wages, poor civic leadership, social dysfunction, drugs."

I have personally watched "corporate raiders" buy seats on my previous employer's board of directors and destroy enormous long-term capabilities of the enterprise to extract some short-term cash by shady financial & legal manipulation.  Those experiences were very mild compared to the events in this book.

The author does not consider the inevitable march of technology that enabled competitors to manufacture and sell higher quality, less-expensive glass items.  And he does not mention examples of the failure of government protectionism & regulations in many industries, e.g. paper mills or textiles to stave off market efficiencies and large-scale shifts in manufacturing.  But he does shine a very bright light on the weaponization of large-scale finance for extremely unethical purposes and value destruction.  Throughout the story, we witness the evolution of "corporate raiding" from junk bonds through leveraged buyouts into pump-and-dump deception and asset destruction.  These phenomena in Lancaster, Ohio are an example of the 21st century's acceleration of the extreme wealth redistribution away from the top 20% into the 0.1% of the US population as the rest of the US population falls into lower wealth and the majority of our citizens fall into poverty.  It is utterly depressing.  If you want to cry in despair, get very depressed for a long time, and be outraged with "righteous indignation" (shorten your life, raise your blood pressure), go ahead and read this book.  Otherwise, spend your time reading uplifting, warm, happy stories such as Code Breakers. 2/5 Stars.  Me? I am now too old to subject myself to this self-torture and plan to return to fun, awe-and-wonder space opera.

Visualizing Conference Buzz in real time

Personally, I never got much out of those "word clouds" when they were popular 15 years ago.  And I have no understanding of "Design" or using visualizations to communicate data. I do find many data visualizations very useful and beautiful.  Here is a cool use of about a dozen data visualizations to watch the "buzz" of the Kubernetes Conference in Europe (KubeCon EU 2022) on Twitter & Slack as the conference is running.  It's another interesting way to attend a conference vicariously and drill into your interests.

Frequent, safe database schema changes in production

Schlomi Noach, a high-profile MySQL tools & concepts guru has abstracted and summarized useful principles for assuring safe changes to database schemas in a rapidly changing environment.  Changes should be:

• Non-blocking
• Lightweight
• Asynchronous
• Scheduled
• Interruptible
• Trackable
• Failure agnostic
• Revertible
• Redeployable

Each of these checklist items is testable in a non-production environment.

Walking Hell, Station Series book 2 by Al Robertson

This book was very disappointing.  The magic system became much too arbitrary, the characters were poorly portrayed, the story was badly motivated, and the horror elements were painfully out of place.  1/5 Stars.  Note to self: avoid this author.

Things are never so bad that they can't get worse by William Neuman

One of my relatives said she found this book interesting and recommended it to me so I had it in my backlog.  It is indeed fascinating. The author goes into enormous detail from many perspectives of how the Venezuelan individuals, their society, and their communities descended past poverty and self-destruction into starvation, privation, and primitive warlord violence.  The book is well-written, somewhat painfully slanted politically, but worthwhile and enlightening, 3/5 Stars.

Cage of Souls by Adrian Tchaikovsky

The author did a fantastic job of "world building" a bizarre far-flung future setting as the last remnants of humanity struggle to survive despite their descent into murderous barbarism.  I am disappointed in the magic system because the silly telekinesis & telepathy stuff is not needed for the story. The book is very long (600+ pages) with great subplots and characters in each section of the main character's adventures.  4/5 Stars.

Raymond Chandler Books as Radio Dramas by the BBC

The BBC did a great job in transferring these Philip Marlow stories by Raymond Chandler into fun radio plays.  Included in the collection are:

• The Big Sleep
• The Lady in the Lake
• Farewell my Lovely
• Playback
• The Long Goodbye
• The High Window
• The Little Sister
• Poodle Springs

During the long airplane trips I took recently these stories were a great distraction.  I never read these "Noir" detective stories but I did watch some of the Bogart movies, so the stories were mostly new.  Chandler uses very similar plot tropes across his books but he also occasionally drops some fantastic philosophical aphorisms and high literature writing.  I am glad I got this collection on Audible. 4/5 Stars.

Das Kind von Sebastian Fitzek

Dieses Buch ist sehr vulgär; die Geschichte ist gut geschrieben; aber die Ereignisse sind schrecklich und deprimierend. Ich wollte nichts über die Themen wissen, die in diesem Buch behandelt werden. 1/5 Sterne.

Giants by Peter Watts

Fun short story; I am glad I finally had time to read it. 5/5 Stars.