Posts

BanksyTechnology 10 Years of “Continuous Delivery” - I have to confess I never read the whole book. It hovers somewhere on my goodreads to read list. But you should :-) Or follow him on twitter. His YouTube channel is a bit too trippy for myself. Rust code in Linux kernel looks more likely as language team lead promises support - this feels like a natural fit. Announcing Rust 1.45.0 - more toys I have no time to play with Data Structures & Algorithms I Actually Used Working at Tech Companies - algorithms: good, algorithms in interviews: bad, just look them up when needed or use libraries Tech firms like Facebook must restrict data sent from EU to US, court rules - as usual this will be painful for small businesses and worked around by the big ones Ron Jeffries is posting his adventures in programming classic video games. He just finished Asteroids and is now working on Space Invaders. Testing sync at Dropbox - nice in depth look at testing at Dropbox and how they improved it through a rewrite. Testing on the Toilet: Don’t Mock Types You Don’t Own - Interesting, as I would do exactly that. Solving it with a fake provided by the third party is obviously nicer or having a wrapper class. P vs NP (Summer Repeat) - In Our Time is one of my favourite BBC podcasts with diverse topics. I usually skip the history ones, but this is an older gem which hits closer to my interests. Product Management The saddest "Just Ship It" story ever - Sometimes you still can ship late and be better, but usually shipping early is the right call. productboard - I am somehow interested in product and idea management in companies. I tried various things from spreadsheets to Jira. This seems to be another feasible option. Engineering Management Tech Sector Job Interviews Assess Anxiety, Not Software Skills - I kind of knew that. I am really bad at interviews myself, thankfully I haven't have to solve any weird programming problems in interviews for a long time. Business Erotica "Dumb books your boss likes" ... yes, yes I do The Pursuit of Perfection: Dominant Architectures, Structure, and Dynamics: A Conversation With Dr. Steve Spear [Podcast] - the usual Toyota Production System example, but also some good other anecdotes. The other thingFernando Simón: dissecting the public face of Spain’s coronavirus crisis - nice profile of the Spanish guy dealing with our health crisis. COVID Risk Chart - helpful stuff by xkcd EnvironmentSix Months on a Planet in Crisis: Greta Thunberg's Travel Diary from the U.S. to Davos - our whole inactivity regarding the climate crisis is very depressing. I have given up hope already, but it is glad to see people like Greta pushing everybody to do better. This is also available as podcast from the BBC: Summer with Greta [Podcast] Car tyres are major source of ocean microplastics – study - electric cars won't save us from this. Cars tires are a major source of pollution in cities and now we know what they are doing to the environment globally too. Car Dependency Baked Into Joe Biden’s $2 Trillion Climate Plan - Maybe I am ageist, but choosing ancient leaders might be one of the problems. He really doesn't have to care about the future any more. #FaceTheClimateEmergency​ - if you do anything, sign this letter of demands to the EU Random hot dogs Competitive hotdog eaters nearing limit of human performance - it is amazing what people can do, it is also amazing what people think is a sensible thing to do The Post-Meritocracy Manifesto - what he said: "But meritocracy has consistently shown itself to mainly benefit those with privilege, to the exclusion of underrepresented people in technology." and not only in technology. The More Senior Your Job Title, the More You Need to Keep a Journal - this has been on my to-do list for years. I just haven't found a way to make it a habit yet. Infrequent Roundup, part N - I stole some of rjp's links already Google continues to move towards YouTube Music, sadly the first upload efforts aren’t great - Google has a habit of annoying all of their users, especially in the media area. I love the upload functionality of Play Music and as far as I know no other service provides something similar. I mostly listen to Techno mixes and this is a good way to share them between devices. With the switch from Play Music to YouTube Music (why?) some of the functionality is being messed up. And Play Music is pretty minimal already. Banksy creates mask-themed work on London Underground - this has already been cleaned up :-) Good Meetings are Jazz - good tips for video conferencing from home. I am still looking for a good microphone set-up, but the lightning tip is also good. I am definitely not going €200+ Euro camera or SLR for the video though. My background needs some tidying too. Blindboy Podcast: Clancys Pancake [Podcast] "How 1990s professional wrestling predicted the 2020s". There really is no hope for the Land Of The Free. Friday Links Disclaimer Inclusion of links does not imply that I agree with the content of linked articles or podcasts. I am just interested in all kinds of perspectives. If you follow the link posts over time, you might notice common themes, though. More about the links in a separate post: About Friday Links.

#markharrisart Fewer links than usual this week. The whole global pandemic situation is certainly acting as a catalyst in a few areas. For cities there are some good developments, for companies some interesting times ahead. Engineering managmentNetflix releases open-source crisis-management tool [LWN link]. I think this has been announced a while ago certainly seems to be interesting if you have the capacity to set it up. ...

rjp inspired me with his random roundups to put a bit more work in my Friday Links. This might have been a big mistake, as it takes me quite a bit more time to put this together and it might be even harder to read. I also merged the podcasts and videos into the other sections to provide more context. If you make it through this, please tell me if they are better or worse. Technology Btrfs at Facebook is a good article by LWN going into the details why and how Facebook is using Btrfs. I am always amazed by scale of Facebook, also mentioned in one of the links of the Fedora 33 article below. Josef Bacik: Consider the web tier for example, we push the entire website to every box in the web tier (measured in hundreds of thousands of machines) probably 6-10 times a day. This is roughly 40 gib of data, getting written to these truly terrible consumer grade flash drives (along with some spinning rust), 6-10 times a day.More Topfew Fun Tim Bray on a mission to prove that Go is in fact not slower than Rust. Seems to be true, but we also find out that regex libraries are slow (surprise!). They want to be small, they want to be big: thoughts on code reviews and the power of patch series - everybody has a different taste for code reviews. Nicolai Hähnle likes the git email workflow. I can't say I agree, but still an interesting perspective. Worrying about the npm ecosystem - Who doesn't? If you think CPAN, Rubygems or Packagist are bad, you haven't seen anything yet. First PHP 8 alpha released I haven't worked with PHP for a while and sometimes it is depressing how fast it moves compared to for example Ruby. Skateboarding and the mindset of a programmer - Everything is like skateboarding and also like programming. Docker and Fedora 32 This article helped me to get rid of the docker-ce packages provided by Docker and move to moby packages included in Fedora, which makes updating them a lot easier. I was basically missing the firewall bit, the CGroups part you have to fix for either version. Engineering ManagementThe Security Value of Inefficiency Bruce Schneier makes the point that when you are 100% efficient, you don't have any margin for error. He is talking about the problems COVID-19 is creating in hospitals and supply chains. This applies equally to engineering teams. The goal should never be to utilize your team to 100% (or ideally 110% as Americans like to say). Without any headroom there is no margin for mistakes, creativity and agility. Pretty good list of company handbooks - the usual suspects like Valve, Gitlab and Basecamp, but many more. All Hands on Deck describes the incident response to A Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day at Slack. As we recently worked on our incident response at Devex this was an interesting read, both from the technical and the management side. Tech Migrations, the Spotify Way Upgrades, migrations, rewrites and changing technologies are one part of technical debt. Interesting to see how Spotify prioritizes and visualizes these. Why Transparent Email Stopped Working For Us and What We Do Instead - the best thing of Buffer being transparent is that we all can learn from them. Transparent Email sounds scary, but secretive emails or private Slack channels are equally so. Software developers: We won't take a pay cut just to work remotely With all the virus fun the world is having a lot of companies are going remote or distributed. This will have an interesting effect on salaries. Some companies are paying localized salaries, others are paying the ones in the headquarter location, which might be as expensive as Silicon Valley. This might destroy some of the startups in low income locations, as they won't be able to keep up with the well funded US companies. The Art of Leadership: 1-on-1s, Staff Meetings, and Manager READMEs with Michael Lopp, Rands in Repose [Podcast] I guess Rands is on a book tour at the moment, still enjoyable as always and a good overview of the book in case you haven't read it yet. Urbanism The Pedestrian Strikes Back "Officials in several countries are getting the message: Cities are about people, not cars." says the NY Times The Lively & Liveable Neighbourhoods that are Illegal in North America [Podcast] Zoning ... do I need to say more? StreetRidersNYC [Podcast] Random group of cyclists organizing protests on bikes in New York. Reminded me of the local Critial Mass protests. Also a good insight into why bicycles are so great in cities. RandomTen years of the sun in one hour – Nasa releases mesmerising space filmnothing to add to the title. Or go directly to the film on YouTube: A Decade of Sun [Video] Off their heads: the shocking return of the rave I am clearly too old for this stuff, but even if I wasn't I probably would wait a little bit, with One Thing Or Another going around. ‘I bought these items and I couldn’t stand them’: inside the mind of a Batman collector I am fascinated with collectors. The need to complete a set of things seems to be so human, but also so unnecessary. I have some tiny collections, but so far I have stopped myself from collecting ice cream. Or ice cream stopped me. I do love Batman though and have some graphic novels and various collectables. Hype and hope: Wearables in the covid era I use a Garmin Fenix 5 sports-watch 24/7. I am expecting that Garmin will figure out some way to use all the data of their users to see some trends regarding COVID-19 and possibly provide some early warning system. “I’m happy coming back, as long as nobody else does” Someone writing about their experience in going back to the "new normal" office. It will be different for everybody, but also strange for all of us. The Mystery of the Shared Earbuds [Podcast] Great story about two different and interesting people getting together because of music. Friday Links Disclaimer Inclusion of links does not imply that I agree with the content of linked articles or podcasts. I am just interested in all kinds of perspectives. If you follow the link posts over time, you might notice common themes, though. More about the links in a separate post: About Friday Links.

Random interests and too many podcasts. How to practice backend engineering. https://lethain.com/how-to-practice-backend-engineering/ Rands: WFH https://randsinrepose.com/archives/wfh/ COVID-19 Risks of Flying https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/06/covid_risks_of_.html Making my doorbell work https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/55312.html Announcing Perl 7 https://www.perl.com/article/announcing-perl-7/ Open-source contact tracing, part 1 https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/823532/64d96b8676118dc9/ Are pets really good for us – or just hairy health hazards? https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/oct/13/are-pets-really-good-for-us-or-just-hairy-health-hazards Git is About Communication https://blog.appsignal.com/2020/06/24/git-is-about-communication.html ‘You can’t instagram tea’: is trouble brewing for the classic cuppa? https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/jan/30/you-cant-instagram-tea-is-trouble-brewing-for-the-classic-cuppa Modern Software Over-Engineering Mistakes https://medium.com/@rdsubhas/10-modern-software-engineering-mistakes-bc67fbef4fc8 The Future of Virtual Events https://hopin.to/blog/the-future-of-virtual-events I’ve Accidentally Become A Strava Stalker https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/culture/amp32955987/strava-stalker/ Podcasts / YouTube GHOSTBUSTERS Reunited Apart https://youtu.be/4JtOHr4IJHQ Micky Dolenz on How The Monkees Went from TV Band to Real-Life Band https://pca.st/sbinoize Test. Measure. Repeat. — w/Eric Ries (Lean Startup; Long-Term Stock Exchange) https://pca.st/kxbeaz6l The Goblin of strange and uncertain times https://pca.st/hk2tkp4h Introducing “No Stupid Questions” https://pca.st/wl4n8q6w The 5G con that could make you sick https://pca.st/vnblnid8 Special: How business can engage against racism, w/Shellye Archambeau (MetricStream, Nordstrom, Verizon) https://pca.st/4ua1ltdk # 86 BJ Fogg: Create Lasting Change https://pca.st/rprddv91 ...

Some open source news, a bit about covid and some art. Corona-Warn-App Open Source Project https://www.coronawarn.app/en/ Introducing GitHub Super Linter: one linter to rule them all https://github.blog/2020-06-18-introducing-github-super-linter-one-linter-to-rule-them-all/ Tsunami: An extensible network scanning engine for detecting high severity vulnerabilities with high confidence https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/06/tsunami-extensible-network-scanning.html Zoom Will Be End-to-End Encrypted for All Users https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/06/zoom_will_be_en.html Loaded terms in free software https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/823224/390948dc629c3dcd/ Buffer is Moving to a 4-day Workweek for the Rest of 2020 https://open.buffer.com/4-day-workweek-2020/ Xing: We are moving our asset delivery to the cloud — and here is why we do that https://tech.xing.com/we-are-moving-our-asset-delivery-to-the-cloud-and-here-is-why-we-do-that-e0977e5f4c43 Introducing new Maps customization features from Google Maps Platform https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/maps-platform/introducing-new-maps-customization-features Linkedin: Rebuilding messaging: How we designed our new system https://engineering.linkedin.com/blog/2020/designing-our-new-messaging-system How to Structure an Engineering Team for Scale https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-structure-engineering-team-scale-yotam-hadass/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-structure-engineering-team-scale-part-2-yotam-hadass/ Technical Writing Courses https://developers.google.com/tech-writing Bigger than big: Linux kernel colonel Torvalds claims 5.8 is ‘one of our biggest releases of all time’ https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2020/06/15/torvalds_linux_kernel_58_one/ Covid-19: Managing Employees’ Return to Work https://www.peoplebox.ai/blog/managing-employees-return-to-work/ rjp: Random roundup for 2020-06-12 https://rjp.is/blogging/posts/2020/06/friday-12/ To highlight the importance of colorists in comics, we asked artists to put their colors on a page by DC artist @stephenbyrne86 https://twitter.com/cred_art/status/1265282176053940225 Podcasts / Webinars D&I Training & Consulting in Germany https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/dampi-training-amp-consulting-in-germany-30456569992 Time Management Masterclass for Managers: Matt Martin (CEO, Clockwise) https://pca.st/1ubzkads The Liberation of RNA https://pca.st/ibz6bvun ...