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:
On Gaming …
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.
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.
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.
If you’re thinking of dipping your toe in, here are 13 tips to get you started.
Let’s be honest, Elite: Dangerous (ED) doesn’t exactly go out of its way to explain things to players.
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 …
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.
So now that you finally have the opportunity to work from home, don’t blow it! Working from home is a skill.
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.
So let’s talk about what we can do for ourselves, and for those around us, to help address those core needs.
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.
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 …
48 personalities that cause software development projects to fail.
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.
No, you’re not crazy for trying this.
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.
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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Ich schenk‘ mir dann mal einen Single Malt ein.
Misc dev advice …
Here are some changes I have noticed over the last 20 years, in random order.
How kind your teammates are has a larger impact on your effectiveness than the programming language you use.
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.
I talked about a bunch of the lessons learned by using and abusing and running and building platforms at scale.
Bad environments (and broken cultures) do not attract nor retain top talent. In fact it does the opposite.
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.
The programming languages research community often develops ideas whose worth is evaluated empirically.
On crypto and security …
You should keep things simple and conventional and easy to analyze; ‘boring’, as the Google TLS people would say.
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.
A revised edition in which we dissect the new manner of secure and authenticated data exchange, the TLS 1.3 cryptographic protocol.
[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.
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.
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.
Today I ended my Pocket Premium subscription.
I have been using Read It Later (now Pocket) since 2011, quite a long time ago. In 2015 I started paying for it because I used the service a lot, I found it very useful, and I did not want it to disappear like so many others have before. The best and notable features were:
