Thursday, April 30, 2020

International Workers' Day Weekend Links

Alphabet’s Q1 2020 earnings call
https://blog.google/inside-google/alphabet/alphabets-q1-2020-earnings-call/

Google Meet premium video meetings—free for everyone
https://blog.google/products/meet/bringing-google-meet-to-more-people/

Case Study : Complex UI Testing
https://blog.ndepend.com/case-study-complex-ui-testing/

Hiring programmers with a take-home test
https://m.signalvnoise.com/hiring-programmers-with-a-take-home-test/

How to do Map Stuff: A Live Community Sharing Event
https://somethingaboutmaps.wordpress.com/2020/03/19/how-to-do-map-stuff/

Fedora Workstation : Swamp draining for 6 years
https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2020/04/28/fedora-workstation-swamp-draining-for-6-years/

Development Environments at Slack
https://slack.engineering/development-environments-at-slack-f3c1339c2445

Fedora 32 is officially here!
https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-32/

Icebreaker
https://icebreaker.range.co/

Most controversial rules in Arkency
https://blog.arkency.com/most-controversial-rules-in-arkency/

The science of why remote meetings don't feel the same
https://blog.google/inside-google/working-google/science-why-remote-meetings-dont-feel-same/amp/

“It never gets easier, you just go faster.”
https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2020/04/27/it-never-gets-easier-you-just-go-faster/amp/

Whispers: Advanced secrets detection
https://medium.com/@SkyscannerEng/whispers-advanced-secrets-detection-15dd64a9dfb7

Zef’s Book Club: No More Feedback
https://zef.me/zefs-book-club-no-more-feedback-8a17485bd276

LinkedIn's CEO Just Shared the Best Work at Home Advice You'll Read Today
https://www.inc.com/justin-bariso/jeff-weiner-buffer-time-work-at-home-tips.html

De Blasio Commits to 100 Miles of ‘Open Streets’
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2020/04/27/breaking-de-blasio-commits-to-100-miles-of-open-streets/

Work-life balance is a lie—and coronavirus is exposing it
https://qz.com/work/1825693/work-life-balance-is-a-lie-and-coronavirus-is-exposing-it/

Why does writing matter in remote work?
http://www.timcasasola.com/blog/writing

Untold stories of northern illegal raves revealed in archive
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-52412160

Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported | Free to read
https://www.ft.com/content/6bd88b7d-3386-4543-b2e9-0d5c6fac846c

rjp: Friday roundup for 2020-04-24
https://rjp.is/blogging/posts/2020/04/24-friday/

Coming soon: Fedora on Lenovo laptops!
https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-laptops/

Keep Your People Learning When You Go Virtual
https://hbr.org/2020/04/keep-your-people-learning-when-you-go-virtual

I’ve never seen ... Back to the Future
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/apr/20/ive-never-seen-back-to-the-future

Webinar Recordings: Lab Hours with John Cutler
https://amplitude.com/webinars/lab-hours-with-john-cutler-europe-recordings

Friday, April 24, 2020

Friday Links

Long-Term Planning
https://medium.com/redbubble/long-term-planning-9c80dc2c1d8b

Rands: Technicality
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/technicality/

Our data centers now work harder when the sun shines and wind blows
https://blog.google/inside-google/infrastructure/data-centers-work-harder-sun-shines-wind-blows/

Case Study: 2 Simple Principles to achieve High Code Maintainability
https://blog.ndepend.com/case-study-2-simple-principles-to-achieve-high-code-maintainability/

How we reduced latency and cost-to-serve by merging two systems
https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2020/reducing-latency-and-cost-for-identity-services

Is Remote Work Greener? We Calculated Buffer’s Carbon Footprint to Find Out
https://open.buffer.com/carbon-footprint/

Clean Code: The Manager’s Guide to Building Quality Software
https://codingsans.com/blog/clean-code

Failed #SquadGoals
https://www.jeremiahlee.com/posts/failed-squad-goals/

Valve's Proton project has brought 6,500 Windows games to Linux so far

https://www.techspot.com/amp/news/84909-valve-proton-has-brought-6500-windows-games-linux.html

Visualizing the Length of the Fine Print, for 14 Popular Apps
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/terms-of-service-visualizing-the-length-of-internet-agreements/

Software Engineering Interviews—the Backblaze Way
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/software-engineering-interviews-the-backblaze-way/

Seamless branch deploys with Kubernetes
https://m.signalvnoise.com/seamless-branch-deploys-with-kubernetes/

Linux kernel lockdown, integrity, and confidentiality
https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/55105.html

How Netflix brings safer and faster streaming experiences to the living room on crowded networks using TLS 1.3
https://netflixtechblog.com/how-netflix-brings-safer-and-faster-streaming-experience-to-the-living-room-on-crowded-networks-78b8de7f758c

Detecting fake accounts on social networks with SybilEdge
https://research.fb.com/blog/2020/04/detecting-fake-accounts-on-social-networks-sybiledge/

Building a PC, Part IX: Downsizing
https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-a-pc-part-ix-downsizing/

Channels Are Free
https://randsinrepose.com/archives/channels-are-free/

Vulnerability Finding Using Machine Learning
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/vulnerability_f.html

Setting up the sway window manager on Fedora
https://fedoramagazine.org/setting-up-the-sway-window-manager-on-fedora/

Rjp: Friday roundup
https://rjp.is/blogging/posts/2020/04/17-friday/

Why I stopped using Microservices
https://www.robinwieruch.de/microservices-tradeoffs

Podcasts & YouTube
Monoliths vs Microservices is Missing the Point—Start with Team Cognitive Load - Team Topologies
https://youtu.be/haejb5rzKsM

Visualizing the spread of Coronavirus
https://pca.st/oopku6mu

Prologue 'The Wire': Way Down in the Hole
https://pca.st/aa8awb9z

Transition from Engineer to Manager: Jeff Perry, Engineering Leadership Coach
https://pca.st/5qvmhgiw

Friday, April 17, 2020

Friday Links

10 Things I Hate About Remote Work- Part One
https://www.learntoscale.us/thought-bubbles/10-things-i-hate-about-remote-work-part-one

From 48k lines of code to 10—the story of GitHub’s JavaScript SDK
https://github.blog/2020-04-09-from-48k-lines-of-code-to-10-the-story-of-githubs-javascript-sdk/

Ride Down Into JavaScript Dependency Hell
https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/04/09/ride-down-the-javascript-dependency-hell.html

Kubernetes Security
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/kubernetes_secu.html

Business as Abnormal: Every Message We’ve Shared With Our Team (So Far) During COVID-19
https://open.buffer.com/covid19/

Lessons from 6 software rewrite stories
https://medium.com/@herbcaudill/lessons-from-6-software-rewrite-stories-635e4c8f7c22

How often does Rust change?
https://words.steveklabnik.com/how-often-does-rust-change

Contact Tracing COVID-19 Infections via Smartphone Apps
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/04/contact_tracing.html

Hacklang at Slack: A Better PHP
https://slack.engineering/hacklang-at-slack-a-better-php-65f239cbc9e9

When should I write an Architecture Decision Record?
https://labs.spotify.com/2020/04/14/when-should-i-write-an-architecture-decision-record/

The Developer Culture Test: What Defines Places Where Developers Thrive?
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/the-developer-culture-test/

Managing scheduled reminders for pull requests
https://help.github.com/en/github/setting-up-and-managing-organizations-and-teams/managing-scheduled-reminders-for-pull-requests

Sawfish phishing campaign targets GitHub users
https://github.blog/2020-04-14-sawfish-phishing-campaign-targets-github-users/

ELS 2020 happening online, and for free
https://www.didierverna.net/blog/index.php?post/2020/04/14/ELS-2020-happening-online%2C-and-for-free

Minding our stories.
https://lethain.com/minding-our-stories/

TBM 16/53: The Boring Bits
https://cutlefish.substack.com/p/tbm-1653-the-boring-bits

New AppSignal Feature: Graph Builder
https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/04/16/new-appsignal-feature-graph-builder.html

How to create an incident response playbook
https://www.atlassian.com/blog/it-teams/how-to-create-an-incident-response-playbook/amp

 

Podcasts


Snorkel: Training Dataset Management with Braden Hancock
https://pca.st/hegkaq26

Software Development Trends 2020: Camille Fournier and Juan Pablo Buriticá
https://pca.st/zootvye7

Overcoming Engineering Leadership Challenges with Farhan Thawar
https://pca.st/episode/f3558aba-ebf2-4137-a4d6-19839d98755c

How to Take Control of Your Time & Get More Done
https://pca.st/f7ltr8qp

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Lead Dev Live 2020

I heard of the Lead Dev conference series some time at the end of the last year. There are not many conferences that focus on engineering leaders, most of the technology conferences are focused on specific technologies, methodologies or the business side.

It was too late for the Berlin 2019 conference, so I set my eyes on either the London or Berlin 2020 conference. In the end I decided against London, because I wanted to avoid short plane trips as much as possible and staying longer in London also wasn’t an option.

Then the COVID-19 thing happened and Lead Dev organisers decided to cancel or postpone some of the 2020 conferences and also offer an online conference: Lead Dev Live 2020.
It was a two day conference on April 7 and 8, 2020. Not only was it streamed live, but also completely free. Each day had a single track happening in the afternoon and evening CEST. 

Streaming was via one long YouTube stream for each day, which was well produced except for some technical issues that were quickly resolved.
In parallel to this everybody had access to a Slack community for general chat, topic specific channels and networking.

In the end I didn’t watch all of the talks, but most of them. I am just going to list the ones I recommend to watch if you get the chance.

Overall I enjoyed the experience, they had some great speakers and some topics I can directly relate to.
I noticed that I found the panels more difficult to follow, you get a lot of whitespace between the speakers and there is no consistent story. This makes it easy to lose concentration, check your messages or fetch a new cup of tea. A normal talk with a story and possibly slides can really grab your attention and take you on a journey.
One thing that didn’t work at all for me were the Slack channels running in parallel to the talks. The main #leaddev-live channel was very noisy and just flooded with people just saying hello. Any announcements flew past so fast that it was pretty much unusable. Something like a channel only for announcements would have been more useful. You also run very quickly into the usual Slack problem of having too many channels and then too many notifications.

I definitely would join another conference by Lead Dev. I might even pay for it.

Would I go to a real Lead Dev conference? Yes, but only if it is close to me. I wouldn’t spend the time and money required to travel further than maybe a two hour flight. 

Day 1  

The first day was focused on the effects of COVID-19 on management and remote work.
YouTube stream day 1


Leading teams through times of uncertainty and upheaval [Panel]

Camille Fournier, Lara Hogan, Rachana Kumar and Christian McCarrick
https://youtu.be/yxiDblyYkrI

Good insight into how different companies and engineering approach the crisis with some well known guests.  


Minimum Viable Business Continuity Management

Meri Williams
https://youtu.be/TCu0gJ_hLq8

Talking about all kinds of aspects of continuity management. From risk assessment, testing, planning and communication.


Avoiding the pitfalls of rebuilding software [Panel]

Dan Berry, Jai Chakrabarti, Bryan Liles and Erica Stanley
https://youtu.be/lsgbGRkysJE

Rebuild or refactor in many words.


Day 2

The second day was more of a mix of different topics.
YouTube stream day 2


Tradeoffs on the road to Observability

Liz Fong-Jones
https://youtu.be/wkXKbC1GWIM

Keep SRE and observability boring. Use the tools that you can easily obtain instead of reinventing the wheel.


Designing effective OKRs [Panel]

Aniela Crisan, Whitney O'Banner, Antonio Verardi and Heidi Waterhouse
https://youtu.be/tBchi7FzRFU

Panel about OKRs in general and in tech teams. I really enjoyed Whitney’s take on this. Her talk from 2019 “Setting Objectives and Key Results in your team” is also worth a watch.
Another related talk watching from 2018, which was also played during one of the technical glitches in this conference is “Goal-Setting Workshops for Managers” by Melinda Seckington.


Apps, stacks, and frameworks: avoiding “Shiny Object” syndrome

Angel Rivera
https://youtu.be/Zk9Rg0Hswu0

This talk was quite random, but still interesting. He talked about his experience of using a new shiny technology (MongoDB) without having any expertise in this himself or in the team. 


Risky business: taking risks in production

Matthew Hawthorne and Leemay Nassery
https://youtu.be/Np8NFmjLn4Q

How to manage risk by using a/b tests, metrics, testing, …


Building and conveying vision [Panel]

Neha Batra, Lawrence Bruhmuller, Kevin Goldsmith and Maria Gutierrez
https://youtu.be/I9-_4WYUEhE

How to create and convey a message to your team.

Thursday, April 09, 2020

Easter Links

Swift: Google’s bet on differentiable programming
https://tryolabs.com/blog/2020/04/02/swift-googles-bet-on-differentiable-programming/

Register now for the DevOps Online Summit 2020!
https://www.devopsonlinesummit.com/2020

getlon.lat — Help! I need a geocoder.
https://getlon.lat/

A Day in the Life of a Backend Product Engineer at Slack*
https://slack.engineering/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-backend-product-engineer-at-slack-e786a8a08fc4

Build versus buy.
https://lethain.com/build-vs-buy/

3 steps for leaders to take in emergencies
https://larahogan.me/blog/3-steps-for-leaders-in-emergencies/

Paper debugging
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/paper-debugging/

10 Things I Hate About PostgreSQL
https://medium.com/@rbranson/10-things-i-hate-about-postgresql-20dbab8c2791

Knative
https://knative.dev/

Apple, Amazon, and Common Enemies
https://stratechery.com/2020/apple-amazon-and-common-enemies/

All Microsoft events will be held online until July 2021
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/companies/microsoft-events-held-online-july-2021

Announcing the Compose Specification
https://www.docker.com/blog/announcing-the-compose-specification/

Introducing our new book “Building Secure and Reliable Systems
https://security.googleblog.com/2020/04/introducing-our-new-book-building.html

The Majestic Monolith can become The Citadel
https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-majestic-monolith-can-become-the-citadel/

One Team at Uber is Moving from Microservices to Macroservices
http://highscalability.com/blog/2020/4/8/one-team-at-uber-is-moving-from-microservices-to-macroservic.html

The Citadel Architecture at AppSignal
https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/04/08/the-citadel-architecture-at-appsignal.html

Podcasts / YouTube


Introduction to Live Coding Music and Visuals
https://youtu.be/-QY2x6aZzqc

Facebook Messenger Engineering with Mohsen Agsen
https://pca.st/svr7aco4

The Lead Dev Live
https://live.theleaddev.com/replays/

Friday, April 03, 2020

Friday Links

Goto: A Dozen New Masterclasses Are Now LIVE!
https://blog.gotocon.com/2020/04/02/a-dozen-new-masterclasses-are-now-live/

Changing the Approach to Debugging in Ruby with TracePoint
https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/04/01/changing-the-approach-to-debugging-in-ruby-with-tracepoint.html

AppSignal Now Supports Node.js: Roadmap for the Coming Weeks
https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/04/01/appsignal-now-supports-node-roadmap-for-the-coming-weeks.html

Code Search for Google open source projects
https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/04/code-search-for-google-open-source.html

Why You Should Ignore All That Coronavirus-Inspired Productivity Pressure
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Why-You-Should-Ignore-All-That/248366/

See Everyone with the Google Meet Grid View Extension
https://www.controlaltachieve.com/2020/03/meet-grid-view.html

Optimizing Ruby Lazy Initialization in TruffleRuby with Deoptimization
https://engineering.shopify.com/blogs/engineering/optimizing-ruby-lazy-initialization-in-truffleruby-with-deoptimization

Eclipse Theia Offers a ‘True Open Source Alternative to Visual Studio Code’
https://thenewstack.io/eclipse-theia-offers-a-true-open-source-alternative-to-visual-studio-code/

Pay Analysis Update: Examining Equal Pay at Buffer in 2020
https://open.buffer.com/2020-pay-analysis/

PlanITPoker
https://www.planitpoker.com/

RailsConf 2020.2 Couch Edition
http://railsconf.com/

xkcd: Pathogen Resistance
https://xkcd.com/2287/

Tech Debt and the Pragmatic Middle Ground
https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/tech-debt/

Fedora's Git forge decision
https://lwn.net/Articles/816282/

dry-rails
https://dry-rb.org/gems/dry-rails/0.1/

Deploys at Slack
https://slack.engineering/deploys-at-slack-cd0d28c61701

CentOS: Git Forge decision
https://blog.centos.org/2020/03/git-forge-decision/

Podcasts


Sorbet: Typed Ruby with Dmitry Petrashko
https://pca.st/d046m2v4

What Does COVID-19 Mean for Cities (and Marriages)?
https://pca.st/4yd9m07x

Remote Team Management with Ryan Chartrand
https://pca.st/au65wer9

Special: First, be human – Thoughts on the crisis from Reid Hoffman
https://pca.st/ubw64tme

Universal Basic Income: Alaska Style
https://pca.st/yfo4i0ke

Cloud Kitchen Platform with Ashley Colpaart
https://pca.st/wvxshy4m