Wednesday, June 15, 2022

Cloud domination


I love reading rants like this one about how & why entire developer environments are moving off of the desktop and into the cloud. As an old fart, I remember when we had telephone switches, answering machines, and call routing devices in our homes and offices, and how they moved quickly up to the "central."  I also remember X-Terminal hardware, where all environments, not just developer systems were in the cloud, somewhat akin to Chromebooks today. Personally, I have always been comfortable developing on remote systems because I always used command line terminals that accessed remote systems and rarely ran local dev until IDEs conquered most of my terminal use for coding.

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Should you brand your workplace a "Family?"

Here are two articles worth skimming: the first is an interesting Harvard Business Review (HBR) study about the deleterious effects of branding and considering work colleagues a "family," and the second is a CEO letter about the separation of work from private individualism, specifically explaining that "work" is not a family.

(I stuffed both articles into a doc for you because they are behind paywalls.)


Eternity by Greg Bear


This sequel to Eon is a somewhat-awkward continuation of the Eon story and character arcs with a few good plot twists.  The overzealous too-many-ideas, awe-and-wonder Greg Bear style had a few too many deus est machina plot rescues but the book is still enjoyable. 3/5 Stars.  I shall probably read the last book in the trilogy at some point.  I still enjoy books written in the style of the golden age, despite my not being at the "golden age" (14-16) to enjoy them best.

Saturday, June 11, 2022

Amongst Our Weapons by Ben Aaronovitch


I don't remember where this book came from or how it ended up in my queue; it was the next one up, so I dutifully picked it up and read it.  It is fun, light, and entertaining.  I love the immersive Thomas Hardy-esque descriptions of London neighborhoods and (accurate) history.  And I appreciate how the magic system is consistent and weaker than real-world physics and technology, such that it does not suspend disbelief.  I may pick up the earlier books or stories but my queue is growing to the point of Tsundoku ( 積ん読 ) so I probably won't. 4/5 Stars.

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

Last Contact: Galaxy's edge S02E05 by Jason Anspach & Nick Cole


More of the same close combat romps of our favorite wise-cracking heroes from the first 14 books killing them first (KTF) while the story line continues to drop very few hints of the coming "big reveal" of the mysterious overlord puppet masters behind the scenes.  Sometimes we need the comfort of light reading. 3/5 Stars.

Saturday, June 4, 2022

Light Chaser by Peter F Hamilton and Gareth L Powell


Short, fun, light space opera with good writing, great plot and somewhat abrupt ending.  One hopes the authors expand upon the universe & the struggles of humanity versus the evil overlords in sequels. 4/5 Stars.

I have become curious recently about the utopian concepts within post-scarcity civilizations such as Iain M Banks' Culture books.  The optimism is dubious in light of the ugly reality contained within numerous historical examples of the resource curse.  (see here and here) Banks needed the "Minds" (powerful, guiding AI) to balance the darkness of human nature that corrupts society.  Hamilton may summon his theology and supernatural religious ideas as a cure.  Is there some purely secular, enlightenment approach to overcoming the resource curse?  Pinker's ideas assume scarcity.  I welcome and enjoy your comments.

Thursday, June 2, 2022

Abrechnung von Barbara Peters


Kompliziert mit vielen Charakteren und falschen Hinweisen. Die Folter war schrecklich, aber nicht widerlich oder vulgär. Gut geschrieben. Ich habe nicht vor, ihre früheren Bücher zu lesen. 3/5 Sterne.

Monday, May 30, 2022

Heroes can help fix Hero Worship anti-pattern

I frequently rail against the all-too common anti-pattern of "Hero Worship Culture" in DevOps.  Heroes don't scale.  Hero worship disincentivizes high-quality, reliable software and focuses on heroic efforts to repair bad code.  My litany is long.

Here is an interesting idea articulated in a Basketball analogy that does not always work. The author gives prescriptive methods for the heroes themselves to systematize reactive support, incident management, and DevOps culture.
 

KubeCon EU summaries


(Horizontal Pod Autoscaling)

The EU version of KubeCon was last week; some good conference read-outs and summaries are starting to emerge. Here is one good summary.  Please leave a comment with others you have found.

Thursday, May 26, 2022

Eon by Greg Bear


Despite the cold war, nuclear war setting, this book, written in 1985, holds up surprisingly well.  There are very few cringeworthy 1980's tropes and situations.  I found it fun and entertaining, 4/5 Stars.