Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
So David at work has been talking about this book quite a lot recently, and that meant I had to read it despite the failure of Debugging to delight me. Interestingly, the book starts by telling the story of the hard disk industry, which aligns well with Chip War’s approach of telling the story of…
I think it was Hugh who recommended this book. I’m greatful as it was an excellent read and definitely didn’t make me duck over to eBay to buy an Intel 4004 chip set to play with. The book uses the backdrop of our current struggles to retain supremacy in high tech manufacturing versus an ambitious…
Hugh Howey is a master of suspense and as a result I found this book hard to read — it’s clear things are off the rails and characters I care about are going to get harmed (another Howey trademark it seems), but you just have to keep on marching through. As a result I found…
One of the core tenets of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is that blameless postmortems / retrospectives should be held for oncall incidents. Its part of the continuous improvement process where we learn from what went wrong and try and create processes to ensure it doesn’t happen again. Very explicitly it is not about blaming anyone…
With Cisco announcing that they no longer need 12% of their staff this calendar year (5% in February, and another 7% in September), I am left wondering what is so terribly wrong with American Capitalism. Interestingly at about the same time someone recommended I read this book, so here we are — seeking to understand…
So I read this paper over the weekend. Naively, its a resonably interesting piece of research around using a generative AI to use descriptions of CVEs from their responsible disclosures to exploit unpatched systems autonomously. Now read that sentence again — these people prompted Chat GPT4 with CVES which didn’t have fixes yet, and had it…
In New python syntax I was previously unaware of, I discussed some new operators I’d recently discovered. One of them is called the Walrus operator, which lets you write code like this: list = ['a', 'b', 'c'] def get_one(): if not list: return None return list.pop() while one := get_one(): print(one) See where we do the…
One of the other architects at work was running a reading group for our North American comrades, and I felt left out so I figured I may as well just pick up the book to see what the deal was. This book is a bit old, and was written at the time to try and…
This post documents the new syntax features I learned about while reading cpython internals. You can create more than one context manager on a single line. So for example Shaken Fist contains code like this: with open(path + '.new', 'w') as o: with open(path, 'r') as i: … That can now be written like this:…
I have been paid money to write Python code since about 2006, so I figured it was probably time that I should understand some of the inner workings of Python. I therefore picked up two books on the topic, this one being the first of the two. This book to be honest isn’t completely what…