Reliable invocation of HTTP APIs
As the new year sets in and winter once again proves to be cold, this blog is forced to give up on the silly season and return to its original greyness, to discuss the pains of unreliable ...
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HTMX-based Hello World
The Silly Season for this blog was short . It was barely sufficient, borderline embarrassing, disconcertingly narrow, disturbingly quiet. Can I fix this before Christmas? All this seriousness is starting to annoy me and I really wish ...
Microservices and the Ops / Dev ratio
The question about microservices is an ill-posed one. We really can’t discuss this without a definition of micro . The word micro means something to large organizations like Google or Netflix – roughly speaking, it is a ...
Python multiprocessing in 5 minutes
I was missing an easy-to-read example of the basic use of Python Multiprocessing so I decided to write one. Conceptual review: we want multiprocessing because we have access to machines with multiple CPU cores (either virtual or ...
Fake dictionary entries
After a number of serious posts, I realized this blog needed a silly season. So here it is. Recently, I wanted to create a fake dictionary entry for a presentation slide but wasn't sure how to achieve ...
Entropy in Engineering Processes
Entropy is a simple concept. Yet every explanation available on the Internet seems to be unnecessarily complicated. As such, the concept is poorly understood outside of specialized circles, and the word is often used in less than ...
The seven deadly traits of startup culture
Things aren't going well. You struggle to understand how they got so out of control. Everything pointed in the right direction at start: you ticked all the right the boxes and made all the right choices. Yet ...
Team capacity discharge: how doing things prevents us from doing things
Everybody knows that software needs maintenance. There should be no need to explain what happens to software without maintenance. This is far from controversial in abstract terms but few people are ready discuss the specific numbers. Perhaps ...
Devops: the funeral
Devops is dead, they say. But the death of Devops is no more than the death of a word. A word – like agile or microservices – that is a tad too open for interpretation. Nobody owns ...
Hype trains considered harmful
They come with a bang, they generate more FOMO than the last available room in booking.com, and when they leave it's your job to collect the wreck. In 2023, strange as it may seem, hype trains are ...
Ideology
An ideology is a fixed set of ideas. There's nothing wrong with that. But the adoption of third-party sets of ideas without enquiring whether the elements in those sets make sense together, or if some of them ...
The four modes of contemporary thinking
As a next step towards the understanding of contemporary human beings, I myself must venture into the dreaded business of simplification . I'll make this as simple as possible, but not simpler . For almost everything in ...
Group sex and the math of political correctness
The greatest challenge in group sex is probably the logistics of consent. It is a central tenet of mature societies that in all sexual encounters everyone must approve of everyone else. Therefore, the logistics of consent grows ...
Simplism is dragging us down
Sometimes the view in front of us might not look especially sharp but we can still grasp the big picture. Other times the huge pixels of oversimplification cover up all nuances of reality. When decision making is ...