what i'm reading: Jan 19

Last week I got access back to my company’s O’Reilly books subscription after a licensing hiccup, so I finally got back to Brendan Gregg’s Systems Performance! Still managed to find time for some other reading though.

• Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine (audiobook) was a rollicking romp through the history of drug companies, accidental discoveries, and unintended side-effects. The author states at the beginning that this is more of a pop book than a science book, but I still learned a lot, and forgave a little pointless meandering.

• Tried for-real pair programming for the first time recently and found it quite valuable, so On Pair Programming by Birgitta Böckeler and Nina Siessegger came about at a good time, even if it seems to assume an organisation where pairing is the norm.

• Rina Artstain has thoughts about how to apply Radical Candor to software development. Lots here that I should work on, since my natural tendency is to avoid confrontation.

• I’m not exactly the sort of person who follows RFC drafts, so this Twitter rant by James Snell is the first time it clicked that HTTP/3 will use the QUIC protocol, which I read a paper about not long ago. I still don’t know about QPACK and stateful header compression, which according to this are overly-complicated.

• I said last week that I love when conference talks are turned into blog posts; this week I found Clint Gibler summarized every talk from AppSec Cali 2019 into a giant blog post, and it is great! AppSec California sounds like a great conference, and a lot of the summarised talks are directly relevant to a project I’m helping out with.

• Lynn Cyrin had some quick thoughts on how the infrastructure engineer role is changing. I hope they write that blog post and go more into depth on this.

• I normally am not super interested in “how I work”-type posts, but this interview with Felianne Hermans introduced me to the Goodnotes app, which I immediately downloaded because taking handwritten notes and annotating PDFs are the main uses I have found for my iPad, and an app that renders my handwriting searchable is golden.

• Christian Posta breaks down why it made sense for Istio to ditch the complexity of a microservice architecture as an example of how to pick the best architecture for your product.

• Kristian Köhntopp turned a long tweet thread into a post about how to achieve reliable rollbacks, which mostly comes down to separating deploy from activation, appropriate feature flagging, and good observability (using Charity Majors' definition of “observability”).

• Liz Rice gets into the weeds about array slices in Go, which is pretty technical but I hope will somehow help me absorb enough Go by osmosis that when I finally come up with a project to build in Go I will have less trouble with it.

• Stumbled across this older John Allspaw piece about why “how” is a better question than “why” in incident review

• Through the Level Up newsletter I keep finding articles a little above my weight class, but I still found Will Larson’s article about what to do in your first 90 days as CTO interesting.

• Mekka Okereke has a great Twitter thread for managers about how to make your team more inclusive by ensuring stretch opportunities are evenly distributed

• Alexis King goes way into depth about dynamic type systems are not inherently better at modelling real-world data

• Quincy Larson’s story about how fraudulent donations came close to bankrupting his nonprofit is a nailbiter with a happy ending.