Chesterton's Fence

Among the fascinating concepts I came across while reading a book about software engineering for long-lived code is "Chesterton's Fence," or second-order thinking.  The TL;DR is that if we do not consider the rationale of previous decisions and understand how we arrived at a certain phenomenon or dilemma we can frequently make a situation worse instead of better.

The boy who would live forever by Frederik Pohl

I enjoyed this story, despite the plot contrivances, 3/5 Stars.

10 best practices for remote software engineering by Vanessa Sochat

This relatively long article in the Communications of the ACM (CACM) article explains the top best practices, habits, and sensibilities for remote software engineers.

The details are very important and some of the definitions contain non-obvious concepts, so don't rely on this summary:

1. Work on things that you care about;
2. Define goals for yourself;
3. Define productivity for yourself;
4. Establish routine and environment;
5. Take responsibility for your work;
6. Take responsibility for human connection;
7. Practice empathetic review;
8. Have self-compassion;
9. Learn to say yes, no, and not anymore; and
10. Choose correct communication channels

Number 2, for example, is about self-compassion, setting charting your own career course, being mindful and forgiving of yourself.

Flow Framework by Mik Kersten

For large tech organizations falling into a death spiral of technical debt, this framework offers some hope.  Tech organizations optimize for how their success is measured.  These measurements appear to motivate better behaviors, even when we account for the common practice of "gaming" metrics instead of embracing their purpose.  The author gave a great talk called The CIO who mistook tech debt for a hat emphasizing the "agnosia" of leaders.  He also wrote the book Project to Product.

Cautionary Story of Services Mesh pitfalls, failures

Eric Fossas posted this horror story of istio failures and weaknesses and warnings about linkerd to which he switched.  He does not even mention the added latencies and failures the extra network hops incur.

Escape Route by Peter F Hamilton

Interesting story in one of Hamilton's universes, not bad, not great.  It's a little too dense and the magic system is not good.  3/5 Stars.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Fantastic, better than his first two books, 5/5 Stars, highly recommended!

Software Engineering at Google

This book is really interesting.  There are many details not only of the policies, patterns, practices, and interesting scale at Google, but also (more useful), an analysis of common software engineering problems, trade-offs, and alternatives for many policies and approaches.  The book is rich with examples and some cookbook guidance for different situations.

GitOps Con 2021

The GitOps conference 2021 has posted all their talks on YouTube. Enjoy.

SQLite databases on static web sites such as github.io

This capability and technology is very cool!