Technology Commentary

While the philosophy is well understood, the truth is that the DevOps infinity loop workflow is broken. Here's how to fix it.

Our engineering and security teams have done some incredible work in 2022. Let’s take a look at how we use GitHub to be more productive, build collaboratively, and shift security left.

How an early embrace of national advertising put Hallmark in the pole position of holiday memories.

storing 1 GiB/month on the cloud 0.02$US web site of my twitter profile (@lemire), HTML alone 296 KiB web site of my twitter profile (@lemire), all data 3.9 MiB Google result for ‘Canada’, HTML alone 848 KiB Google result for ‘Canada’, all data 3.7 MiB Node JS runtime 164 MiB Size of the Java (19) … Continue reading The size of things in bytes

Yet another year is coming to a close; that can only mean that the time has come to indulge in a longstanding LWN tradition: looking back at the predictions we made in January and giving them the mocking that they richly deserve. Read on to see how those predictions went, what was missed, and a look back at the year in general.

Prefer Integration, Automation, and Communication over Documentation

Directory of all the websites, apps and services using passwordless for authentication.

This time, ChatGPT created a web app to help me drink faster.

Coding your own login page used to be simple. Okta explores with DigitalOcean, Netlify and Vercel why developers are opting for identity components.

To make the most of the cloud and reap the benefits, organizations need to focus on modernizing and simplifying IT operations through service ownership and automation.

AWS’ CodeCatalyst aims to handle, in a low-code way, the entire software development cycle: building a repository, setting up logging, running a CI/CD pipeline.

More counter.social "private account" bypasses - Xe's Blog

Fictional travelogue shows man taking selfies in ancient Greece, Egypt, and more.

Posted on Tuesday 20 Dec 2022. 954 words, 10 links. By Matt Webb.

Sanity.io is one of the new cool kids regarding headless CMSs. I decided to give it a try and create almost precisely the same blog as the one you are...

Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.

15 years ago, Gerhard discovered magic in the form of Ruby on Rails. It was intuitive and it just worked. That is the context in which Gerhard fell in love with infrastructure and operations. Today, for special episode 77, we start at Seven Shipping Principles, and, in the true spirit of Ship It, we’ll see what happens...

The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s “mostly dead”. Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of what “significant in history” means. So let’s talk about some “mostly dead” languages and why they matter so much.

A common narrative that plays out in my household is my wife asking me if I know some authors name, me saying no I do not, and her spending about 3-5 minutes letting me know how I should know this person because they are well-known essential academic storytelling that anyone who is smart should know about. She doesn’t intend to be mean with her response, it is just her approach to knowledge sharing, and something I have gotten used to over the years. However, most of the time, I can tell you that by the time you get to know whatever it is she wants me to learn, I could really care less about who this person is, let alone do the work to learn more about them. A lot of this is about me, as I didn’t go to University I tend to have a thin skin for what I “didn’t learn”, but I’d say this is a narrative approach I see play out daily in the API world, and it is something I try to keep out of my approach to sharing knowledge.

I learn so much telling stories in the API space. I’ve been iterating upon a lifecycle diagram with my team over the last six months, and with each wave of changes I tend to share on social media just to see what everyone says. The current iteration, which I only shared on LinkedIn), is seeing a healthy bit of resharing, comments, and likes. I enjoy the different things that folks say about it, all which help me paint a fuller picture of how folks see the world around them within enterprise organizations. A significant portion of the people who viewed this visual see much needed information they are missing from their view, and see it as an opportunity to add a handful of steps to how they deliver APIs. These people view this document as containing many of the missing pieces of the puzzle for their world. I definitely value the feedback from these folks, as there is clearly an appetite for more knowledge and structure regarding how they deliver APIs across their operations. The next significant portion of people point out how it is too much. The simple days are gone, and this is just going back to the waterfall days. They don’t want to see the big picture, and actively push back on the reality that it exists. These people were genuinely upset and pushing back on the fact that I would suggest so many elements are involved with the reliable and consistent delivery of APIs today. These folks aren’t just uninterested in the big picture, and they deny it should exist. After that, there was a group of people who could care less. They are comfortable with their position, and don’t have any aspiration to understand the big picture. They didn’t see any need to push back on my map of the larger landscape or challenge the information it contained. “Meh” was their position. Honestly, I find this area one of the most interesting out of all the people who responded, because you actually want and count on people being like this across your enterprise if you are leadership. This is why I publish images like this. Not because I am declaring that everyone should follow my master plan, or even be aware of it, and support it. I publish these stories to elicit a response from people, learn, evolve, and iterate upon my storytelling around these visuals. It is extremely revealing to have people tell me I am being “waterfall” when I am just mapping out the reality that exists behind some successful APIs. I am not saying this is THE formula everyone should follow. I am just saying that it is A formula, and how do all of these elements apply in your world—-or not. I actually do not believe there is one right way to do APIs. I don’t believe there are entirely wrong ways to do APIs. I am just fascinated by how people do APIs, see APIs, and participate, collaborate, or push back on how we do APIs. I thoroughly enjoy mapping out all the building blocks of this world and then presenting them to others to understand how they view the landscape around them, and use it to frame where they fit into the overall landscape. Not everyone wants to see the full API picture, and not everyone can deal with the cognitive load associated with the big picture. And this is OK.

I have been blogging here for the last 20 years. Every Tuesday and Thursday, ...

My best blog posts, newsletter issues, and podcast episodes of 2022.

Software is developed in the time between meetings