Makura no Soshi

On computer and programming history …

• What is Code?
  Software has been around since the 1940s. Which means that people have been faking their way through meetings about software, and the code that builds it, for generations.
• Learning BASIC Like It’s 1983
  In 1983, though, home computers were unsophisticated enough that a diligent person could learn how a particular computer worked through and through. That person is today probably less mystified than I am by all the abstractions that modern operating systems pile on top of the hardware.
• How Lisp Became God’s Own Programming Language
  Lisp transcends the utilitarian criteria used to judge other languages, because the median programmer has never used Lisp to build anything practical and probably never will, yet the reverence for Lisp runs so deep that Lisp is often ascribed mystical properties.
• Should you learn C to “learn how the computer works”?
  I’ve often seen people suggest that you should learn C in order to learn how computers work. Is this a good idea? Is this accurate?
• C Portability Lessons from Weird Machines
  In this article we’ll go on a journey from 4-bit microcontrollers to room-sized mainframes and learn how porting C to each of them helped people separate the essence of the language from the environment of its birth.
• The Coming Software Apocalypse
  A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

On teams and their problems …

• The First Question to Ask When Building Teams – Is This Really a Team?, byStefan Lindbohm and Viktor Cessan
  You might assume that if you put together a bunch of people and give them a goal, they’re a team. But that’s not how it works.
• SRE: The Biggest Lie Since Kanban | the agile admin
  So doing SRE can – and in many shops does – mean doing nothing new. You just call your existing ops team SRE and figure you’re done.
• Kobayashi Maru Management – Rands in Repose
  A Kobayashi is a system failure because the usual means of getting important work done in a group of humans failed spectacularly.
• Your app is an onion: Why software projects spiral out of control
  You start with the best of intentions. You hire a developer to build out your startup idea. But almost every week, it feels like the project needs tweaking. Features start creeping in, and the scope slowly expands. It’s as if the project has a life of its own, and is trying to destroy your life.
• Why Are Enterprises So Slow? – zwischenzugs
  In this article I want to explain a few things about enterprises and their software, based on my experiences, and also describe what things need to be in place to make change come about.
• lenazun/working-remotely
  Working remotely sounds great. We think we’ll save ourselves the commute and we’ll be able to flexibly weave in and out of work and home life. In reality, work takes a different shape when there is no office, and we’re all in different environments trying to connect to other humans. […] These are some of the things we’ve learned while working remotely

More about microservices and Docker …

• Serverless Microservice Patterns for AWS – Jeremy Daly
  Since I work with serverless microservices all the time, I figured I’d compile a list of design patterns and how to implement them in AWS. I came up with 19 of them, though I’m sure there are plenty more.
• 10 Tips for failing badly at Microservices, by David Schmitz
  If you mind my tips, then surely you will fail at Microservices and your boss will never again try to move away from your beloved vintage monolith.
• The Death of Microservice Madness in 2018
  Microservice madness goes something like this:
  Netflix are great at devops.
  Netfix do microservices.
  Therefore: If I do microservices, I am great at devops.
• Services, monoliths, modularity
  My not-useful takeaway from these reckons is that what you need is modularity, not microservices.
• Microservices Are Something You Grow Into, Not Begin With — Nick Janetakis
  Let’s talk about when it might be a good or bad idea to start using microservices. SPOILER ALERT: it’s not the same for every project.
• Revisiting Using Docker, by Gregory Szorc
  When you look at all the options for running containers in 2018, I think it is obvious that Docker – usable though it may be – is not ideal for a significant number of container use cases.
• Docker is the dangerous gamble which we will regret | Lawrence Krubner, Smash Company
  Summary: don’t use Docker, or any other container technology. Use Terraform and Packer instead.

Some computing history …

• The complete history of the IBM PC, part one: The deal of the century | Ars Technica
  One could claim that the IBM PC was not really IBM’s first PC at all.
• The Observation Deck » The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
  Judging merely by its tombstone, the life of Solaris can be viewed as tragic: born out of wedlock between Sun and AT&T and dying at the hands of a remorseless corporate sociopath a quarter century later.
• Where Vim Came From
  And yet Vim is also a mystery. […] Despite its ubiquity and importance, there doesn’t seem to be any kind of committee or organization that makes decisions about Vim.
• Linux Load Averages: Solving the Mystery
  Load averages are an industry-critical metric – my company spends millions auto-scaling cloud instances based on them and other metrics – but on Linux there’s some mystery around them.
• Living on the Plateau
  Most of us work in an environment of virtual infinities. There may be some contraints out there somewhere, but most of us know we will never bump into them. That’s what happens when you ride Moore’s trains through twenty-eight doublings.
• Wie erkläre ich es meinem Kind: Internet in der DDR / Blog / Privat – Lutz Donnerhacke
  Ich hatte heute ein längeres Gespräch mit einer Journalistin, die fragen zur DDR-Top-level-domain “.dd” hatte. Das Gespräch war lang. Allerdings stellte sich schnell heraus, dass sie zu jung ist, um sich die Realität von vor 30 Jahren vorstellen zu können.

• Colin Percival: Some thoughts on Spectre and Meltdown
  While I have not been involved with handling these issues directly, I think it’s time for me to step up and provide both a wider context and a more broadly understandable explanation.
• How Meltdown and Spectre Were Independently Discovered By Four Research Teams At Once | WIRED
  “As far as I can tell it’s a crazy coincidence,” says Paul Kocher, a well-known security researcher and one of the two people who independently reported the distinct but related Spectre attack to chipmakers. “The two threads have no commonality,” he adds. “There’s no reason someone couldn’t have found this years ago instead of today.”
• Myths Programmers Believe about CPU Caches – Software the Hard way
  Such misconceptions are mostly harmless (and maybe even helpful), but can also lead to bad design decisions. For instance, developers can start to believe that they are insulated from the above concurrency bugs, when working with single-core-systems.
• Why Raspberry Pi isn’t vulnerable to Spectre or Meltdown
  Happily, the Raspberry Pi isn’t susceptible to these vulnerabilities, because of the particular ARM cores that we use. To help us understand why, here’s a little primer on some concepts in modern processor design.
• Jens Neuhalfen: Meltdown and spectre explained — for normal people
  This is for “normal people”. With these slides I fill the hole between we are going to die! and white noise. You, the reader, will understand what went wrong, how it went wrong, and why this is bad. I will try to minimise the computer specialists words to an absolute minimum. Promised! (Recording from FrOSCon2018)
• Jon Masters: The spectre of hardware bugs
  Great Keynote and detailed slides with more information. (Recording from FrOSCon2018)

• A Manifesto Against the Enemies of Modernity
  Modernity can be fought for, and it’s probably what you already want unless you’re on the lunatic fringe of the left or right.
• How French “Intellectuals” Ruined the West: Postmodernism and Its Impact, Explained
  Postmodernism presents a threat not only to liberal democracy but to modernity itself.
• The Categorical Im-Pratchettive
  After all, it takes as axiomatic that nobody is outside the moral world […]. Kant isn’t having that, and neither is Pratchett. This manifests, for Pratchett, in a refusal to take the dramatically easy way of demonising one or other outgroup.
• The Strange and Terrifying Case of the Turboslav Empire
  The Turboslavic ideology is also something more than just a fake origin myth. It is a very potent tool in the current political and ideological fight in Poland. History is very much at the front-lines here.
• Der lange Weg nach Charlottesville – Von Truman bis Trump (Gesamtartikel)
  Charlottesville [ist] keine Anomalie, sind die rechten Hetzer keine Randgruppe ohne Bezug zur GOP. Charlottesville, die Präsidentschaft Trumps und seine Wähler sind vielmehr der logische Schlusspunkt einer langen Entwicklung.
• The Eclipse Conspiracy
  I am not saying the eclipse isn’t going to happen. I’m just saying there are two sides to every story.

Politisches zum Wahl-Wochenende…

• Politik als Luxus
  Wer sich nicht einmal eigene Kinder zutraut hat keine Nerven für den Luxus Politik.
• Schulzzug: Veränderung! Ach nee, doch nicht.
  Allerdings ist die Wahl nur solange bizarr, wie man davon ausgeht, die Menschen wählten, um etwas zu bekommen, und seien überzeugt, CDU und FDP könnten dieses Etwas geben.
• Perspektivlosigkeiten
  tl;dr: Die Wahl ist gelaufen, es gibt nichts zu wählen. Ich geh trotzdem wählen, weil ich keinen Trump-Effekt haben will.
• Seit ich bei #G20 war, habe ich Angst
  Ich habe mich noch nie so unwohl im Nachgang meiner Arbeit gefühlt, wie jetzt nach den G20-Protesten. Und das liegt nicht vordergründig an den Aktionen militanter Gewalttäter im Schanzenviertel.
• Des Faschodrives neuste bürgerliche Fassade
  Man kann von einer weltweiten Lust am Totalitären sprechen, am Autokratischen, an uneingegrenzter staatlicher Gewalt und einfachem Freund/Feind-Denken.
• Chronik des Überwachungsstaates
  Vor allem seit der Jahrtausendwende erlassen Bundesregierungen Gesetze, die kontinuierlich Grund- und Freiheitsrechte abbauen, indem Überwachung ausgedehnt wird.

Even more on programming and architecture.

• Design patterns for microservices
  The beginnings of a pattern language for microservice architectures.
• Design patterns for microservices
  The AzureCAT patterns & practices team has published nine new design patterns on the Azure Architecture Center.
• Microservices – Please, don’t
  [I]deally anyone reading this should walk away with a series of issues to think about when deciding if the move to a Microservice based architecture is right for them.
• Checklist for Python libraries APIs
  Useful checklist for build good Python libraries APIs. Based on “How to make a good library API” PyCon 2017 talk.
• The Occasional Chaos of AWS Lambda Runtime Performance
  Does Lambda runtime performance scale proportionally to the memory setting? […] Let’s find out.
• Prudent Engineering Practice for Cryptographic Protocols
  Today’s paper serves to highlight how even the experts can get it wrong, and presents 11 design principles for cryptographic protocols – some of which may be useful in the design of other kinds of protocols too.
• The curious case of the switch statement / fuzzy notepad
  I felt like writing about the switch statement for some reason.