Makura no Soshi

On AWS …

• AWS Graviton2 – James Hamilton, Perspectives
  I believe there is a high probability we are now looking at what will become the first high volume ARM Server.
• Observations on ARM64 & AWS’s Amazon EC2 M6g Instances – Liz Fong-Jones, Honeycomb
  For our use case, M6g is superior in every aspect to C5: it costs less on-demand, has more RAM, exhibits lower median and significantly narrower tail latency, and runs cooler with the same proportional workload per host.
• A Detailed Overview of AWS API Gateway – Alex DeBrie
  AWS API Gateway is an awesome service to use as an HTTP frontend. […] In this post, you’ll learn the different steps in an API Gateway request. For each step, we’ll see what you should be doing in that step and how it fits in the overall picture.
• How to optimize AWS Lambda performance – Efi Merdler-Kravitz, Lumigo
  In this article, we are going to talk about various parameters to be considered for AWS Lambda performance tuning.
• Why is AWS IAM So Hard? – Stephen Kuenzli, #NoDrama DevOps
  IAM is really important and it’s really hard for a lot of people, even on good teams with robust processes.
• AWS isn’t killing your business, you just suck at it – Corey Quinn
  Companies that currently aren’t thriving love to blame AWS for their problems. But I don’t think the criticism sticks.

I still like Zabbix as a simple allround monitoring solution. With its agent and UserParameter configuration it is very flexible and can be used (and abused) in many interesting ways. Here I want to show and compare three different patterns of collecting metrics from a service:

1. simple item fetch
2. fetch and send
3. preprocessing

Read the rest of this entry »

On Gaming …

• The cost of games – Raph’s Website
  Lots of people have made the observation that in terms of raw purchasing power, players pay around half of what they used to in the 80s.
• Confessions of an Unreal Engine 4 Engineering Firefighter – Allar’s Blog
  Engineering is sometimes the most asinine and painful thing you can do, but those who love it understand the feeling of solving a problem and having something Just Work.
• The Existential Terror of Battle Royale – Jeff Atwood
  Battle Royale is not the game mode we wanted, it’s not the game mode we needed, it’s the game mode we all deserve. And the best part is, when we’re done playing, we can turn it off.
• How to survive in Fortnite if you’re old and slow | Keith Stuart, The Guardian
  If you’re thinking of dipping your toe in, here are 13 tips to get you started.
• Elite: Dangerous — A Comprehensive Beginner’s Guide
  Let’s be honest, Elite: Dangerous (ED) doesn’t exactly go out of its way to explain things to players.
• World of Warcraft perfectly predicted our coronavirus panic – Amit Katwala, WIRED UK
  An accidental pandemic in the online game offers a valuable insight into the way people are behaving during the coronavirus crisis.

On Covid-19 induced work from home conditions …

• Work in the Time of Corona – Alice Goldfuss
  As someone who has worked remotely for multiple companies, in different setups, I wanted to offer some assurances and tips for maintaining your mental health while adjusting to this new life.
• How To Work From Home | You’ve Been Haacked
  So now that you finally have the opportunity to work from home, don’t blow it! Working from home is a skill.
• Managing Remote Teams – A Crash Course – Andreas Klinger
  Remote work is the logical evolution of digital work. And the best-practices of remote teams are often learnings for all digital knowledge work teams.
• Creating predictability and stability in times of rapid change | Lara Hogan
  So let’s talk about what we can do for ourselves, and for those around us, to help address those core needs.
• Psychologische Sicherheit in unsicheren Zeiten – Michael May, Mayflower Blog
  Unternehmen haben gegenüber ihren Mitarbeitern eine Fürsorgepflicht, die in der Regel durch die Führungskräfte gelebt wird. Ich hoffe, deine Firma hat die nötigen Schritte eingeleitet und wartet nicht, bis die Einschläge noch näher kommen.
• Diese Form von Home Office ist: alles andere als normal! – Sabine Wojcieszak, getNext IT
  Die Situation, in der sich viele Unternehmen und auch viele unserer Kunden gerade befinden hat, wenig mit dem zu tun, was eigentlich unter verteiltem Arbeiten oder Home Office verstanden wird. Und es hat noch weniger mit New Work und der Motivation dahinter zu tun.

On teams, agile methods, and remote work …

• How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects – Neil on Software
  48 personalities that cause software development projects to fail.
• Why companies are still designing open plan offices – Katharine Schwab, Fast Company
  First, you tear down the walls and dispense with the soulless cubicles. Then you put everyone at long tables, shoulder to shoulder, so that they can talk more easily.
• Why Enterprise Agile Teams Fail – Sam McAfee
  No, you’re not crazy for trying this.
• Asynchronous Communication: The Real Reason Remote Workers Are More Productive – Amir Salihefendic
  Study after study after study into remote work has made one thing clear: Remote workers are more productive than their office-bound counterparts. What’s not entirely clear is why.
• Software Sprawl, The Golden Path, and Scaling Teams With Agency – charity.wtf
  Recently you saw something terrifying that you cannot unsee: your company is using all the languages, all the environments, all the databases, all the build tools. Shit!!! Your ops team is in full revolt and you can’t really blame them.
• How to run a Futurespective | Liz Keogh, lunivore
  Futurespectives, like Retrospectives, look back at the past… from the future! I find them very useful when there isn’t much to retrospect on: at the start of a project or initiative.

On art, design, and craftmanship …

• New Berlin rapid transit route map – Pasha Omelekhin
  A transit map should be simple, comfortable, and nice-looking, designed with loving care and for people. It should attract tourists to the city and have reasons to make residents enjoy it. Berlin has received such a map.
• Map of the Literature II – Martin Vargic
  The Map of the Literature is a truly gargantuan visualization of the 5000 years of literary masters and their works, showing how the different literary genres sprouted, branched and eventually evolved to their modern state.
• Apple’s HQ, Ruskin, Gothic Architecture, and Agile – Ian Miell
  Once you start thinking about how building encourages or discourages a means of living compatible with a human, creative and dynamic life, then you start to see it everywhere.
• wenn die leute wissen, wie würste gemacht werden … – wirres.net
  mittlerweile habe ich sogar meine zweifel, ob es sowas wie talent überhaupt gibt und ob wir talent als das wahrnehmen, was eigentlich das ergebnis von enorm viel übung, oder genauer vom festbeissen und manische verfolgen einer sache, einer fähigkeit, eines ziels ist.
• Kind of Bloop: An 8-Bit Tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue – Andy Baio
  Kind of Bloop is a chiptune tribute to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, a track-by-track 8-bit reinterpretation of the bestselling jazz album of all time.
• Peak Music – anmut und demut
  Ich schenk‘ mir dann mal einen Single Malt ein.

Misc dev advice …

• How is computer programming different today than 20 years ago? – Sedat Kapanoglu
  Here are some changes I have noticed over the last 20 years, in random order.
• Things I Believe About Software Engineering – Wesley Aptekar-Cassels
  How kind your teammates are has a larger impact on your effectiveness than the programming language you use.
• The Zen of Code Reviews: Review As If You Own the Code – Michael Sorens
  Whoever signs off on a code review agrees, essentially, that they would be able to support it in the future, should the original author of the code be unavailable to do it. Review code with the energy you’d use if you owned the code.
• Ten Platform Commandments – Charity Majors
  I talked about a bunch of the lessons learned by using and abusing and running and building platforms at scale.
• So you want to Onboard a DevOps Practitioner – Martin Jackson
  Bad environments (and broken cultures) do not attract nor retain top talent. In fact it does the opposite.
• Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design – Dave Akin
  These are some bits of wisdom that I have gleaned during that time, some by picking up on the experience of others, but mostly by screwing up myself.
• Empirical Evaluation Guidelines
  The programming languages research community often develops ideas whose worth is evaluated empirically.

On crypto and security …

• Cryptographic Right Answers – Latacora
  You should keep things simple and conventional and easy to analyze; ‘boring’, as the Google TLS people would say.
• The PGP Problem – Latacora
  Serious cryptographers have largely given up on PGP and don’t spend much time publishing on it anymore (with a notable exception). Well-understood problems in PGP have gone unaddressed for over a decade because of this.
• The New Illustrated TLS Connection – Michael Driscoll
  A revised edition in which we dissect the new manner of secure and authenticated data exchange, the TLS 1.3 cryptographic protocol.
• Curl to shell isn’t so bad – Martin Tournoij
  [It] is a very direct way to run code from the internet, whereas the other methods are running code from the internet, but with extra steps. It may ‘feel’ different, but in reality it’s just the same.
• Why Don’t People Use Formal Methods? – Hillel Wayne
  Verifying code is a hard problem. More and more people are doing it, though, as theorem provers and SMT solvers get more sophisticated. It will probably remain a specialist thing for the foreseeable future.
• Running servers (and services) well is not trivial – Chris Siebenmann
  These days, it’s often relatively easy to ‘just set up a server’ or a service, especially if you already work in the cloud. Spin up a VM or a Docker image, install some stuff, done, right? Well, not if you want this to be reliable infrastructure.