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…
Deciding when to filter out large scale refactorings from code analysis
I want to be able to see the level of change between OpenStack releases. However, there are a relatively small number of changes with simply huge amounts of delta in them — they’re generally large refactors or the delete which happens when part of a repository is spun out into its own project. I therefore…
A quick summary of OpenStack release tags
I wanted a quick summary of OpenStack git release tags for a talk I am working on, and it turned out to be way more complicated than I expected. I ended up having to compile a table, and then turn that into a code snippet. In case its useful to anyone else, here it is:…
Rejected talk proposal: Shaken Fist, thought experiments in simpler IaaS clouds
This proposal was submitted for FOSDEM 2021. Given that acceptances were meant to be sent out on 25 December and its basically a week later I think we can assume that its been rejected. I’ve recently been writing up my rejected proposals, partially because I’ve put in the effort to write them and they might…
pngtools, code that can nearly drink in the US
I was recently contacted about availability problems with the code for pngtools. Frankly, I’m mildly surprised anyone still uses this code, but I am happy for them to do so. I have resurrected the code, placed it on github, and included the note below on all relevant posts: A historical note from November 2020: this…
Shaken Fist 0.2.0
The other day we released Shaken Fist version 0.2, and I never got around to announcing it here. In fact, we’ve done a minor release since then and have another minor release in the wings ready to go out in the next day or so. So what’s changed in Shaken Fist between version 0.1 and…