Logically

Reliable invocation of HTTP APIs

Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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 ...

HTMX-based Hello World

Wed, 13 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Tue, 19 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Sat, 16 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Sat, 01 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Wed, 31 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Mon, 15 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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

Tue, 09 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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 ...