Recently I’ve been playing a bit more with Docker images and Docker image repositories. I had in the past written a quick hack to let me extract files from a Docker image, but I wanted to do something a little more mature than that. For example, sometimes you want to download an image from a…
Author: mikal
Complexity Arrangements for Sustained Innovation: Lessons From 3M Corporation
This is the second business paper I’ve read this week while reading along with my son’s university studies. The first is discussed here if you’re interested. This paper is better written, but more academic in its style. This ironically makes it harder to read, because its grammar style is more complicated and harder to parse….
A corporate system for continuous innovation: The case of Google Inc
So, one of my kids is studying some business units at university and was assigned this paper to read. I thought it looked interesting, so I gave it a read as well. While not being particularly well written in terms of style, this is an approachable introduction to the culture and values of Google and…
Shaken Fist v0.4.2
Shaken Fist v0.4.2 snuck out yesterday as part of shooting this tutorial video. That’s because I really wanted to demonstrate floating IPs, which I only recently got working nicely. Overall in v0.4.2 we: Improved CI for image API calls. Improved upgrade CI testing. Improved network state tracking. Floating IPs now work, and have covering CI. shakenfist#257…
Starting your first instance on Shaken Fist (a video tutorial)
As a bit of an experiment, I’ve made this quick and dirty “vlog” style tutorial video to show you how to install Shaken Fist on a single machine and boot your first instance. I demonstrate how to install, setup your first virtual network, start the instance, inspect events that the instance has experienced, and then…
Books read in January 2021
Its been 10 years since I’ve read enough to write one of these summary posts… Which I guess means something. This month I’ve been thinking a lot about systems design and how to avoid Second Systems effect while growing a product, which guided my reading choices a fair bit. A fair bit of that reading…
Shaken Fist 0.4.1
I don’t blog about every Shaken Fist release here, but I do feel like the 0.4 release (and the subsequent minor bug fix release 0.4.1) are a pretty big deal in the life of the project. The focus of the v0.4 series is reliability — we’ve used behaviour in the continuous integration pipeline as a…
Goals Gone Wild
In 2009 Harvard Business School published a draft paper entitled “Goals Gone Wild“, and its abstract is quite concerning. For example: “We identify specific side effects associated with goal setting, including a narrow focus that neglects non-goal areas, a rise in unethical behavior, distorted risk preferences, corrosion of organizational culture, and reduced intrinsic motivation.” Are…
A super simple sourdough loaf
This is the fourth in a series of posts documenting my adventures in making bread during the COVID-19 shutdown. This post has been a while coming, but my sister in law was interested in the sourdough loaf last night, so I figured I should finally document my process. First off you need to have a…
The Mythical Man-Month
I expect everyone (well, almost everyone) involved in some way in software engineering has heard of this book. I decided that it was time to finally read it, largely prompted by this excellent blog post by apenwarr which discusses second systems effect among other things. Now, you can buy this book for a surprisingly large…