rdoherty

I love reading, here's a few meatier books I've read recently:

* Seeing Like a State - great overview of how states (and corporations) lose visibility into reality due to the abstraction levels they operate at

* Normal Accidents - all about how things like nuclear reactors, ships and large systems naturally have accidents

* Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty - great easy read about how high reliability organizations manage complexity and dangerous, high tempo situations.

It's not just the untyped problems, the runtime definitions of functions, properties, etc make it nearly impossible to debug unless you have the state of your production data locally. (Or you ssh into your prod server and open up a REPL, load the state and introspect everything there). Good luck debugging locally in a nice IDE. It's a horrific nightmare. I use to love Ruby until I had to debug it live.

Skimming the list, looks like most extensions are for scraping or automating LinkedIn usage. Not surprising as there's money to be made with LinkedIn data. Scraping was a problem when I worked there, the abuse teams built some reasonably sophisticated detection & prevention, and it was a constant battle.

This is probably one of the best summarizations of the past 10 years of my career in SRE. Once your systems get complex enough, something is always broken and you have to prepare for that. Detection & response become just as critical as pre-deploy testing.

I do worry about all the automation being another failure point, along with the IaC stuff. That is all software too! How do you update that safely? It's turtles all the way down!

I'm a HOA president and while HOAs can be very extreme, the flip side is if homeowners are breaking rules designed to protect property or common areas (pool, lawns, playground, etc) a $100 is not enough to stop people. Thankfully our HOA focuses on our common areas and is responsible for all exteriors and lawns (it's all townhomes), so the lines are a bit clearer.

We've had all sorts of wild issues such as building scaffolding on top of balconies (not attached), ripping up common area plants, parking issues (we all have garages, street parking is guest only), drying food on the pool deck (really), dumping garbage bags outside in the common area and more. If we can only levy a $100 fine there's little incentive for some people to stop doing things that impact the community.

I do cringe when I hear about these crazy HOAs of what are usually a collection of single family homes. I think a better approach would be some kind of limitations of the what HOAs can have rules about vs the penalties. Interiors of homes should be generally off limits (aside from townhomes that are all technically 1 building, so you should not be doing anything structural without approval). For single family homes with private property surrounding them I'd rather there be limits that are purely for safety, legal reasons or impacting common areas.

I took a Waymo that drove on an 'expressway' which had a speed limit of 40mph and it was definitely a different feeling. I did feel a bit scared, at 25mph it feels like a gentle theme park ride, at 40mph it's beyond that and feels dangerous.

Not explicitly, but there were rumors a few days before. Also the signs were there: every single meeting room was booked, meeting rooms all had water & tissues, etc.

I worked at Yahoo in 2008 when they laid off thousands and yes every single person got a calendar invite and met in a meeting room 1:1 with a manager. It was difficult but they did it. Times definitely have changed.

I agree, I've been at places that can tie alerts at a host level to an automated task runner. Basically a workflow system that gets kicked off on an alert. Alert fires, host is rebooted or terminated. Helpful for things like this.

Sometimes I forget, sometimes I need to run an errand or take the kids to school or any number of things happen.

It will hold my coffee at the perfect temperature all day. Also if the battery runs out I can put it on its charger and after ~5 mins it will start heating my now cold coffee back up to temperature. I thought it was kinda gimmicky too before I bought it but I am surprised at how great it is to have perfect temp coffee all the time.

I mean washing pots & pans and things that can't go into the dishwasher and loading and unloading the dishwasher.

Under $100 - Ember mug. No more reheating coffee a few times/day or trying to drink cold coffee. I was surprised at how much I enjoy it. A nice napkin holder that is easy to pull napkins from. Vertical magazine/tablet organizer. Whiteboard next to my desk. Anything simple that makes a frequent chore or task 50% easier.

Under $1000 - Twice/week 'house helper' who does dishes and laundry. My wife travels a few weeks/month and we have 2 kids. Having someone do all the dishes and laundry saves me at least 5hrs/week.