what i'm reading: Jan 26

This felt like a slow reading week since I got sick and spent a lot of time not wanting to do anything more strenuous than play phone games, and didn’t finish either book that I’m working through. Sunday morning make-coffee-and-read-articles is becoming a relaxing ritual though.

• Been slogging through Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things (audiobook), since I’ve encountered most of these concepts before—in works that were probably inspired by the first edition of this book, to be fair. Later in the book there’s some good content about resilience engineering that kept my attention a little better. Lesson learned: always skip the preface in audiobooks.

• I didn’t feel like I had the time to attend the local Global Diversity CFP event but I’m glad Wen Cai wrote a post summarizing the key lessons of the experience.

• Re-read Suz Hinton’s guide to coding accessible developer tools, which has a lot of good things to keep in mind for any project

• Jon Cutler’s post on “starting together” was less focused than I’d hoped from the tweet that led me to it, but has valuable takeaways about how to shift a team from a top-down to an autonomous mindset. The most important point being that this is hard.

• Looking for good guidelines on documentation led me to Gene Hughson’s Your Code is not Enough, which mostly sells the “why” of documentation but at the end gets a little into “how”

• More practical advice can be found in Stephanie Blotner’s primer on documentation content strategy on Increment

• I don’t have kids of my own but I still worry about how to keep teens from being groomed by white supremacists on social media

• Even though I don’t love watching talks, I might have to go through Cindy Sridharan’s Best of 2019 in Tech Talks because they all sound amazing. (I saw one of these live!)

• Always looking for beginner-friendly security content, and while Troy Hunters overview of using content security policies isn’t quite as accessible as I’d like, it’s not bad

• Had Gregor Hohpe’s treatise on the perils of trying to avoid lock-in open in my browser for a while. Glad I finally got around to reading it because it’s both insightful and funny.

• Also funny was Jan Schaumann’s tweet thread about Ops lessons we all learn the hard way, collected here into a blog post. I’ve never even been Ops but I can still relate to some of these.

• I was hoping for more out of Farnam Street’s framework for making smarter decisions, which makes a case for people being bad at decisions but, despite the title, does not actually explain how to do better. It does however have a lot of links at the end which may be more promising.

• Teri Radichel has an interesting two-part post about why patching software in a large organization is hard with the first part addressing the technical challenges and the second looking at organizational issues

• Elizabeth Ayer advocates for “radiating intent” instead of “begging forgiveness” as a healthier attitude toward taking action without waiting for permission. I like that she at least nods to how this strategy might not work for everyone though.

• Jon Moore elaborates on Coda Hale’s piece I linked last week with some more math about organizational scalability which points to contention for shared resources and coherence/communication overheads as limiting factors.

• Keavy McMinn has a great post about how she approaches technical research when solving engineering problems. Her advocacy of “spikes” makes me think of the second divergence phase of the double diamond design model, which apparently makes at least one thing I’ll take away from The Design of Everyday Things.

• Christian Carter generously shared some of the resources he’s using to learn to write a Go web app, and I started with Jon Calhoun’s Using the Service Object Pattern in Go

• Jessica Kerr talks about why to use event sourcing architectures even though they are not more scalable, faster, or simpler than the alternatives.

• I enjoyed Radhika Morabia’s Anti-Workaholic’s Guide to Getting Ahead, which is a very pragmatic (if cynical) approach to how to build skills without burning yourself out.

• Last year I read an intriguing paper on how Google’s new congestion control algorithm for QUIC was unfair to TCP traffic, but lead author Ranysha Ware just published a new article about the research that is much more comprehensible to a layperson!

• Mattias Verraes posits a strategy for making tech debt visible that unfortunately I don’t think will fly in my office.

• Liz Fong-Jones' Honeycomb blog post about automating infrastructure-as-code deploys was a little over my head because I don’t know the first thing about Terraform, but I was sucked in by the reference to haunted graveyards in the title and learned a bit about optimizing cloud hosting bills.