Cobra Outlaw by Timothy Zahn

The story trundles along with more parallel plots, intrigues, and too many people from the same family, 3.5 Stars.

Four Words: Reliability, reliability, reliability, reliability

Observability and learning are emerging as the big themes in site reliability engineering (SRE) at the moment.  The tools vendor FireHydrant (Robert Ross) synthesises and summarises the concepts into where we should put our emphasis in 2021.

How did things go right?

I somehow missed Ryan Kitchens' awesome talk at SRE-Con. Ryan's talks are always spectacular and controversial. But this one is especially fun.  He goes deep into how we communicate and has lots of references for further reading.  The biggest take-away is that we should concentrate more on learning and less on process. I especially love his concept of a 2-D timeline that describes many parallel factors in what went right and what went wrong.  Don't miss this one!

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink & Leif Babin

It is a little hard to get past the testosterone haze and combat metaphors but the concepts are  applicable to leadership in very many contexts, including business & work.  3/5 Stars. Interestingly a few indirect messages emerge from their battle examples:  

1 - The authors disrespect the Iraqi military elements allied to the USA

2 - The authors have great respect for the "Muj" (Mujahidenn مجاهدين‎) against whom they fought, despite hating the Muj's barbarity, brutality.

konveyor & peloris

Over the weekend I was referred to the konveyor.io Kubernetes evangelism society and movement, and discovered those folks develop a very interesting tool called peloris.

Peloris is part of Redhat's approach to "metrics driven transformation."

and is a drop-in set of grafana dashboards for Redhat's openshift clusters.  It appears the concepts from the book Accelerate book concepts are gaining enormous momentum across the software industry.

I wish our teams could use true open source tools at my day job.

Ready Player 2 by Ernest Cline

It's a fun sequel with great 1980's and 1990's pop culture video games and movie references, geeky D&D players, and more of the same drama as the first book.  The big idea, awe, wonder of advanced tech and AI are far fetched (quite bad) but the story is very entertaining, 4/5 Stars.

web page load performance measurements with Lighthouse

I stumbled across this blog entry about improving web page performance in which the authors write about the "Lighthouse" calculator.  Apparently web developers all run the calculator in the Chrome developer tools or node.js on their workstations.  But you can also use the pagespeed insights portal to run the tool on public Internet pages from several regions.  I, of course, ran the tool on some of my company's public pages and we do quite well, scoring in the 70's and 80's in most categories.

ARM for server workloads?

The folks over at Percona discover some interesting results using Amazon's new ARM processor offerings.  Intel, of course, has another generation of processors that will blow the doors off of all competitors; but in the meantime, if you run PostgreSQL on AWS, consider moving to their ARM instances.

Civil, respectful, political discourse

I normally try very hard not to get distracted by national politics.  This video is an exception worth sharing.  One one side of our national politics we have people who fear a "great purge," where our big-tech companies and winning political party are "using their power to repress, silence, ruin and criminalize tens of millions of private citizens for the crime of opposing them politically."  And on the other side of the debate we have leaders vigorously enforcing the rule of law to prosecute those who aid and abet criminal activities.  Professor Swire explains how and why we should reconcile and ends his interview with these quotes from Abraham Lincoln:

A government of the people, by the people, for [all] the people should not perish from the earth.

With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

No Rules Rules by Erin Meyer and Reed Hastings

Although this book is not applicable to my "day job" because I do not work at a company that is in any way like Netflix, it was still fun and entertaining.  Yes, people at Netflix live in fear of getting fired. Yes, your colleagues at work tell you all the time about your mistakes.  Yes, you are very stressed out about big decisions.  But the authors defend this high-pressure, high-stress daily work life as a good way to run a business. 4/5 Stars.  THe book is worth your time to skim through it.