Makura no Soshi

On programming…

• The hardest problem in computer science
  …is, of course, naming. […] We can’t even agree on names for basic concepts.
• Know Thy Complexities!
  This webpage covers the space and time Big-O complexities of common algorithms used in Computer Science.
• Let’s stop copying C / fuzzy notepad
  The popularity of C has led to a number of programming languages’ taking significant cues from its design, and parts of its design are… slightly questionable.
• Falsehoods Programmers Believe About CSVs
  Partially as a companion piece to my recent post about how CSV is an encoding nightmare, and partially an expression of frustration, I’ve decided to make a list of falsehoods programmers believe about CSVs.
• Parsing: an expanded timeline
  After five decades of parsing theory, the state of the art seems to be back where it started.
• explainshell.com
  write down a command-line to see the help text that matches each argument

A few notes on monitoring, debugging, and testing.

• Chris’s Wiki : blog/unix/ManyLoadAveragesOfUnix
  It turns out that the meaning of ‘load average’ on Unixes is rather more divergent than I thought it was. So here’s the story as I know it.
• Illustrated Guide to Monitoring and Tuning the Linux Networking Stack: Receiving Data
  This blog post expands on our previous blog post Monitoring and Tuning the Linux Networking Stack: Receiving Data with a series of diagrams aimed to help readers form a more clear picture of how the Linux network stack works.
• Using jemalloc to get to the bottom of a memory leak
  The opportunity to really get to the bottom of a memory problem is quite a rarity in the life of a developer and this showed in the fact that our investigations (alongside other work) lasted over a month.
• Ten Tired Trends In Software Testing Discourse
  I’ve read your blog posts and I’ve been to your talks and talked to you after the talks too. And here’s what I want to know: if you love automation so much how come all you can do is warn me about how not to use it?
• Notes on concurrency bugs
  Non-deterministic bugs are rare, but they can be extremely hard to debug and they’re a productivity killer. Bad non-deterministic bugs take so long to debug that relatively large investments in tools and prevention can be worth it.
• Why Writing Correct Software Is Hard
  The cost of correctness – like the energy cost of reducing entropy – is a result of the “natural laws” of computation, that cannot possibly be avoided.

More stuff on cloud and service architecture.

• A dissection of our favorite folk architecture
  I’m fascinated by the lore and mystery behind microservices. As a concept, microservices feels like one of the most interesting folk architectures of the modern era. It’s useful enough to be applied widely across different usage patterns and also vague enough to mean many different things.
• DevOps vs SRE: delayed coverage of the dumbest war
  I’m not personally pissed off by the google SRE book, actually, just a little bemused at how legitimately unaware they seem to be about … anything else that the industry has been doing over the past 10 years.
• Stack Overflow: A Technical Deconstruction
  One of the reasons I love working at Stack Overflow is we’re allowed encouraged to talk about almost anything out in the open.
• The Children’s Illustrated Guide to Kubernetes
  Introducing Phippy, an intrepid little PHP app, and her journey to Kubernetes.
• So You Wanna Go On-prem Do Ya
  If you run a successful SaaS platform, at some point someone is going to come to you with the question: can I run it myself? If you’re considering offering a private version of your SaaS, this post might be for you.
• PCI Compliance in the Public IaaS Cloud: How I Did It
  Over the past few years, I have heard many folks assert that one can be a PCI-compliant merchant using public IaaS cloud, and I have heard just as many state that it’s not possible. In retrospect, I have found most of them – including myself – to be misinformed.
• Video, Keynote NDC Sydney 2016: “If I knew then what I know now…” – Scott Hanselman
  Do you know there are actually more Javascript frameworks than there are apps that use Javascript frameworks?

• What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists
  It began after I started as a teaching assistant at the department of physics. The first note was a classic – it proved Albert Einstein wrong. The second one solved the problem of quantum mechanics by dividing several equations through zero, a feat that supposedly explained non-determinism.
• How to Recruit – Rands in Repose
  Recruiting and engineering must have a symbolic force-multiple relationship because the work they do together – the work of building a healthy and productive team – defines the success of your team and your company.
• It’s Not Just Standing Up: Patterns for Daily Standup Meetings
  Daily stand-up meetings have become a common ritual of many teams, especially in Agile software development. However, there are many subtle details that distinguish effective stand-ups and a waste of time.
• The Ultimate Guide to Remote Standups
  Remote companies have a unique opportunity to create optimal work environments for their their employees. With a few tweaks, the standup format helps remote teams get more done, faster.
• Meditations Redux
  The company I helped start, DefenseStorm, just celebrated its second year […] I’m posting the lessons I’ve learned because I think they might be useful to others.
• Being A Developer After 40 — Free Code Camp
  Hi everyone, I am a forty-two years old self-taught developer, and this is my story.

Some food for political thought, ranging from the IT perspective to the global economy.

• What Amazon Learned From Microsoft
  SaaS is the new proprietary. Truly the AWS Console is this generation’s Visual Studio.
• What is Google Up To?
  This has led us to a curious but reasoned inference, that Google is not always acting as a business in the conventional capitalist sense. The company’s motives at times appear to have a broader agenda, better described in social, even artistic terms, rather than exclusively business terms.
• A lesson in social engineering: president debates
  There is no debate, there is only social engineering.
• America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny
  The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. […] And it is when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.
• How American Politics Went Insane
  Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It happened gradually—and until the U.S. figures out how to treat the problem, it will only get worse.
• The end of capitalism has begun
  Capitalism, it turns out, will not be abolished by forced-march techniques. It will be abolished by creating something more dynamic that exists, at first, almost unseen within the old system, but which will break through, reshaping the economy around new values and behaviours.
• The Age of Disorder
  Authoritarianism, mercantilism, and nationalism are beginning to replace democracy, capitalism, and internationalism.

Thoughts and recipes to build and run systems and services.

• How to build stable systems
  The first decision is easily the most important. It is one of ideology: the developers are in control of the software. Not the other way around. Managers are not in control of the software. Product Owners are not in control of the software. Developers are.
• The 15-point DevOps Check List
  The checklist could help you proceed with setting up a DevOps culture but don’t consider it as a unique way to proceed with your organization transformation.
• 10 Philosophies for Engineers
  In this post and podcast episode, I convey some loose philosophies about modern software engineering. These are strong opinions weakly held. I welcome debate and discussion.
• 3 Reasons AWS Lambda Is Not Ready for Prime Time
  When I first sat down to write my microservice using Lambda, I really wanted it to be the greatest thing since sliced bread. […] Sadly, it was too good to be true.
• Microservices & Einradfahren
  Zu meiner großen Enttäuschung muss ich nun feststellen, dass die Leute in der IT, bzw. Developer wie sie heute genannt werden, mit den gleichen Denkmustern arbeiten wie die Business Kasper.
• Creating a Microservice? Answer these 10 Questions First
  Microservices appear simple to build on the surface, but there’s more to creating them than just launching some code running in containers and making HTTP requests between them.

A failure, a success story, and several thoughts on system design.

• Inside the sad, expensive failure of Google+
  Create a social network or risk everything.
• Jetbrains: The unicorn Silicon Valley doesn’t like to talk about
  The reason why Jetbrains has such little competition is because few startups and programmers are willing to learn and embrace non-sexy tech.
• Why I Strive to be a 0.1x Engineer
  Given the cost of maintaining everything we build, it would literally be better for us to do 10% the work and sit around doing nothing for the rest of our time, if we could figure out the right 10% to work on.
• Boring Systems Build Badass Businesses
  Build the most minimal solution you possibly can. See if customer’s like it, use it, and will pay enough for it. Only then build it into a full solution.
• Logging v. instrumentation
  Logging and instrumentation are two perennially hot topics in software development generally, and seem to be enjoying a certain renaissance in the context of microservices particularly. And I see quite a lot of confusion on the topic.
• How to build stable systems — Medium
  The first decision is easily the most important. It is one of ideology: the developers are in control of the software. Not the other way around. Managers are not in control of the software. Product Owners are not in control of the software. Developers are.

Politik & Menschen

• Der dunkle Bruder des Feedback, Ralf Westphal
  Der dunkle Bruder Hilferuf muss aus dem Schatten des Feedback heraustreten. Denn alles, was nicht anerkannt wird, stiftet Unruhe – und das, ohne dass man womöglich genau sagen könnte, woher die kommt.
• Die Webregierung, Teil I – Der Tod des Open Web, mspro
  Ich persönlich habe für mich das Open Web bereits abgehakt. Es war eine gute Idee. So wie der Kommunismus eigentlich eine gute Idee war.
• Von den Quellen des Hasses, Benjamin Birkenhake
  Heute bin ich mit irgendwelchen Regionalzügen über irgendwelche Dörfer gefahren und in den Zügen sassen die Menschen, die in diesen Dörfern leben.
• Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace, Stephen Wolfram
  Ada Lovelace was born 200 years ago today. To some she is a great hero in the history of computing; to others an overestimated minor figure. I’ve been curious for a long time what the real story is.
• Gamers Mimic a Lot of the Tactics of the Religious Right, Jef Rouner
  Criticism of the status quo, no matter how mild, is felt like an attack on a person’s morality. […] Players who are perfectly happy with a white, male-centric, violent, heteronormative status quo in gaming feel judged for that happiness when marginalized people and their allies speak up about how it affects them.
• How SysAdmins Devalue Themselves, Tom Limoncelli
  If we all make a concerted effort, then all sysadmins, as a community, can make sure that the role of system administrator stays devalued for a very long time.