what i'm reading: february 11

Instead of posting a reading list on Sunday I instead read 5 books, so while I feel like I haven’t gotten much reading done that’s not entirely correct.

Completed Books

• Finished Algorithms of Oppression: how search engines reinforce racism by Safiya Umoja Noble. A little more dry and academic than I was expecting, but I did learn some things about how algorithms intersect poorly with marginalised identities.

• Re-read Martha Wells Murderbot Diaries novellas for at least the second, possibly third time. I deeply enjoy this character and this world, and the novellas are quick so they make good stress reads.

  • All Systems Red
  • Artificial Condition
  • Rogue Protocol
  • Exit Strategy

• Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir was nothing at all like what I expected, despite being exactly what all my friends described it as. Perhaps not exactly alike. Billed as “lesbian necromancers in space”, while they technically do go to space for half a page, it is primarily a sword-and-sorcery Clue-style mystery

Articles

• A disheartening but ultimately positively-framed retraction from Dr. Kate Laskowski about how she discovered that a collaborator faked the data for some of their research papers

• Vicki Boykis tears apart Apple’s ostensible “commitment to privacy”

• Discovered Lara Hogan’s blog via Twitter, and liked this post about how to offer challenges to your teammates and this one about how to manage up

• Level Up newsletter linked to this Madeleine Dore article with the promising title of How to reduce ‘attention residue’ in your life, but it mostly talks up a particular program offered at University of Melbourne, and is low on practical advice for the average person.

  • tl;dr schedule a chunk of time regularly to knock off half-a-dozen or so small life admin tasks and you’ll feel more in control of your life.

• Quinn Crossley wrote how “Women and Non-Binary” is not the best way to be inclusive, including a few clear steps about how to make your communities more welcome to all genders.

• This 2019 year in review of open source licenses by Luis Villa gives some context for the Hippocratic License I stumbled upon recently, as well as many other details about open source licenses that I didn’t know until now!

• Alex Pareto wrote a quick blog post on how to scale an app from 1 to 100K users. It summarizes commonly used architecture patterns for each stage of growth, with a few nods to specific technologies and where they fit into the picture.

• In this podcast excerpt Kelsey Hightower shares his unpopular opinion that monoliths are the future, aka microservices and kubernetes won’t save you from bad architecture decisions.

• After listening to Brotopia I had a tiny bit of context for how startup VC works so Alex Danco’s post about how the software startup world needs a financial realignment wasn’t completely over my head, but I still glazed over a lot of the specifics about production capital and liquidity preferences. However this line made me crack up: “Don’t take debt” is tech’s “Four legs good, two legs bad.”

• Janelle Shane has produced another work of horrifying genius by training the GPT-2 neural net on a collection of vintage American recipes involving gelatin

• Tanya Reilly describes fighting through organizational friction as side quests in a point-and-click adventure game and is absolutely right. This is the kind of frustrating side quest I’m aiming to reduce in my new role.

• I still don’t know what Project Zero is, but this is an incredible deep dive into how they tracked down an obscure Chrome buffer overflow bug which I definitely didn’t fully understand but has some interesting insight into debugging.

• Speaking of debugging, Chelsea Troy, seemingly partially talked into it by Twitter, posted a debugging case study in the form of a murder mystery

• An interesting (and sad) conclusion from The Atlantic about why Boeing lost its focus on engineering and safety

• After reading Systems Performance I have a much clearer idea what it means that Apple is deprecating macOS kernel extensions, and how that is both good for security and bad for certain types of tooling.

Papers

• Serverless computing: one step forward, two steps back Hellerstein et al., CIDR’19
• Security Certification in Payment Card Industry:Testbeds, Measurements, and Recommendations Rahaman et al., CCS'19