what i'm reading: June 6

I, like most people I know, have been a little distracted from technology-as-usual by a constant feed of police brutality. It’s been a jarring reminder that some people don’t have the luxury of ignoring racial injustice, and that we should all be working harder for equality every day. I’ve been donating money to community organizations and researching my local police department’s history of using force, how about you?

I still read a lot before I heard about the protests, and continue to poke at tech stuff on occasion for my own mental health. Stay safe out there. Black lives matter.

Books

• Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet by Claire L. Evans (audiobook) has captured my interest much more than Programmed Inequality, which I still have 6 hours left of and despair of ever having the interest to finish.

• Couldn’t sleep this week, so did a little escapist re-reading of some of my favourite Courtney Milan historical romances. The Novella Collection and The Heiress Effect

• Skimmed Alex S. Vitale’s The End of Policing, which is available as a free ebook.

Papers

• Was intrigued by the title of Understanding, Detecting and Localizing Partial Failures in Large System Software by Chang Lou, Peng Huang, and Scott Smith, and the fact that it won Best Paper at NSDI ‘20 so picked it for my work paper reading group.

Articles

Racial Justice

• Harry Kopyto asks Can we ever truly transform or democratize the police as a response to to other essays on how to address police brutality. Article is a little wordy but I enjoyed the history on how police forces were invented.

• Resources to support Black communities in Canada (original link was removed, here’s a different one I read)

• Nate Powell’s fascinating 2019 comic About Face explores how a certain aesthetic militarism became normalised in modern American society.

• Tatiana Mac wrote a full-of-attitude guide for white women who want to make meaningful actions in support of Black people. It’s very much a 101 kind of list, but I liked that it is focused.

• Only realised the third or fourth time I came across this list of 75 things white people can do for racial justice that it was originally written in 2017, but it is updated and still relevant.

Core skills

• Several days after I made a mediocre presentation about threat modelling for developers, Jim Gumbley posted this guide to threat modelling for developers, including advice on how to run a remote session. Sigh.

• Interview about Twitter University, an interesting approach to documentation

• Jamie Dobson’s post on Emergent Strategy isn’t quite as comprehensible as I want it to be, though I am interested to see if his strategy patterns would be easier to make practical use of.

• I was hoping this article on building psychological safety in teams would be more practical, but it’s mostly about how Elsevier has set up a peer facilitation program. May need to instead look into the recommended book, Amy Edmondson’s The Fearless Organization

• Ryn Daniels has a whole series on introspecting as a mid-career technologist, starting with On Mid-Career Challenges

Distributed Sytems

• While trying to find more about the Twitter Engineering Effectiveness team I discovered Caitie McCaffrey, who has an older post of resources for getting started with distributed systems, including some I hadn’t seen mentioned before.

• Dan Luu talks about how distributed tracing was made more useful at Twitter, primarily by making it easier to query

• Christina Delimitrou writes about the reasons behind and implications of increased heterogeneity of hardware in cloud data centres, which is an area I hadn’t really heard of.

• Jaana Dogan’s article on how Spanner avoids single-point write failures should have been clearer to me after all the reading I’ve done about distributed systems, but I feel like I’d need to do more reading to have an instinct for what consistency model is implied.

Programming languages

• Caitie McCaffrey also had this tempting article on testing in Go. Is it time to write more than code puzzle answers in Go?

• As a bit of a Javascript outsider, this outsider’s perspective of modern Javascript rings very true to me. I just want to load this module!

Remote working

• Learning From Incidents posts five common themes in adaptation to Coronavirus. I found the “how to adapt” sections useful.

• I have been struggling to exercise at home for many of the reasons Casey Johnston outlines in At-Home Workout Goals That Are Fun and Don’t Suck. I wonder if any stores have weights back in stock yet?

• Jay Shirley at Stripe reviews Stripe’s remote engineering hub, an interesting organizational choice they made a year ago to become a more remote-friendly company. While it’s not meant as an advice post for companies struggling to adjust to remote work, it does list things that have worked well for Stripe over the past year.

• Jen Gilbert for Lyft Engineering wrote about their short-notice remote onboarding program, which has some solid tips.

Scaling systems

• Venkatesh-Prasad Ranganath’s reviews of books on architecting for scale contains some books I’m familiar with and others I’m not, so more to add to the reading list.

• Marta Kosarchyn writes on the Khan Academy Engineering blog about how Khan Academy handled 2.5x normal load during Covid, which amounts to “our cloud hosting scaled automatically”, but still neat to see what some of their specific architecture choices are.