I like the idea of me being so clueless that I have to share tweets on wordpress.
I’m consistently amazed by Hashicorp software. I’m inordinately proud of this image. Have a nice day.
When I returned to Texas in 2000, I spent some time writing and recording music using equipment I’d purchased in ’96 or ’97: a couple of Shure omnidirectional mics, an M-Audio Omni I/O & Delta 66 combo, and whatever instruments I had available at the time, using an old version of Cakewalk for which I had some digital effects packages. At that time (my recollection isn’t clear, this was all sometime between ’00 and ’03), I found a songwriter’s forum mostly frequented by electronica and hip-hop folks hosted at deadmurder.com, where you could post songs and other users could review them. This was in the heyday of the OLGA, Harmony Central, altcountrytab.com, and other tabbers’ sites (shout out to Chuck Taggart’s amazing Uncle Tupelo lyrics and tabs), so I’d occasionally post tabs for songs, too. Anyhow, deadmurder used a bunch of wacky php scripting that changed pretty frequently, then underwent major changes and a shift to the wire.fm domain name, and one downside of all the fancy scripting was that the Wayback Machine didn’t index the site in a way that I can see any of my old content.
Occasionally, I’ll be going through a box or random stack of CDs and come across some of the stuff from those days, and I’ve probably got multiple copies of mp3s ripped from CDs I burned at one time or another. None of it was particularly good quality, but I opened a SoundCloud account and posted some of it there, as well as transcribed the lyrics I wrote to the best of my recollection at github.com. Many of the recordings were made early on in the songwriting process, which accounts for the difference between the recorded lyrics and those I put up on github.
For a while, I played with a group of folks in Olympia, WA under the name Popoko Darling, and I may post some of the tracks I’ve got from what we recorded, although my contribution wasn’t in the writing of the thing, at best I improvised the part I played to complement the lyrics and written guitar part. Still, I had a lot of fun playing different instruments (guitar, bass, accordion, keyboard, ARP synth, resin key vibraphone, and probably something else), and I like Rick’s songs.
Welp, I’ve been composing this post on my phone after the morning diaper change and it’s time to get going to work. I just wanted to get these thoughts out there since much of this stuff has suffered bit rot or otherwise been lost to the sands of time.
Speaking with my wife as we’re getting ready for bed, I tell her that I was checking on bills and making sure everything was all up to date. We touch on some others, then Time Warner Cable comes up.
Those fuckers. Someone should bazooka them like Daryl did those jerks on their bikes
For background, TWC had majorly screwed up our service multiple service calls in a row some months back, and we were told that we’d get free Internet service for a year. We got free Internet service on one bill, then it went back to full price and the few times I tried to call them on it the representative said there was no such note on our account.
This was months back, and in the interim K gave birth to a child, so there’s been plenty of reasons to think about other things by now. She’s still very angry about it. Time Warner Cable really knows how to build satisfying customer relationships…
An interesting quote from a Miami Herald movie review of Ex Machina:
I have a real ambivalence about these giant tech companies. On the one hand, they’re amazing. They’re like NASA in the 1960s, except instead of going to the moon, we are exploring artificial intelligence and how to make universal translators and how to get technological benefits to remote parts of Africa. All this stuff is helpful and good and useful and admirable. But at the same time, there’s no real oversight on these companies. They’re not transparent. They’re hidden. That makes me nervous. I don’t care if they’re doing something wrong. That’s irrelevant. When they have this much power, someone needs to be watching them. So somewhere in this movie, I am trying to gently fan the flames of that fear. I wouldn’t call it paranoia, because that’s unreasonable. This is a very reasonable fear. There is no privacy anymore. Just forget it. That land grab is gone. It doesn’t exist. And that should be scary.
-Alex Garland
just jawing about how pivotal @pivotal is and stuff and then this:
There’s software that deploys software. There’s a contract between that deployment and the actual deployed software, and that’s maintained in a way that is both constraining and liberating.
I think one way to frame that which is easy for people to understand, at least in our circle is, yeah, you only have 140 characters, but you could do a lot with 140 characters. The constraints give you more than the …
Coté:
Exactly. Yeah, it’s almost like we have a gluttony problem in IT, where if you put stuff in front of us, or give us options, we’ll eat it, sort of my eating method style. Any food you put in front of me, I’ll eat. To some extent, it’s nice to have constraints if you have that disorder.Andrew Schafer:
To some extent, that’s the betrayal of enterprise software. The last few decades of enterprise software, it’s been this war over who could have the feature matrix, and people are often buying software that they don’t think about systemically. A lot of times, they don’t have any experience with the technology, and they’re not going to be the ones to use it, because of the way the selling happens through executive channels.As a consequence, for the longest time, pre-GitHub, pre-Twitter, pre-free flow of information, a lot of software was just sold on whoever could cram the most features into a presentation and show it to the executives.
As an employee of a frequent consumer of <bombast>Enterprise Software</bombast>, I can’t agree with this enough, and the bizarre thing is that even though you can hold up the examples of how Gartner is talking about doing things better, and the business world is coming around, etc., the self-awareness isn’t at a point where they say “I said I wanted a managed service like SaaS and you showed me a managed service like IaaS, my staff said that isn’t what I asked for, then you presented me with a bill which I promptly paid. That’s not a workflow that will give us the results we want!” and start changing.
Listening to @snowded talk about the taxi fare workaround and then saying that behavior is justifiable in the right circumstances lined up the Cynefin Framework to me in a way I hadn’t quite engaged with yet. If you are interested in talks around managing complexity, systems thinking, lean theory, and haven’t yet, do give the recent @foodfightshow discussion a listen.
As both capitalist and communist states – not to mention the technological world – have evolved under the illusion that men purposefully built them, ideological optimism seeps into every niche of our lives. It is made worse by mass culture which feeds our most destructive illusions, fostering the belief that if we’re only justified (and who isn’t?) – if we only calculate things correctly, if we only do the right thing (and who doesn’t?) – then the future must yield the desired results.
-Stephen Vizinczey
On the one hand it’s fair to blame her, because it’s true – she’s the only one who knows these things, but on the other hand it’s not like she’s out there maliciously trying to make your life worse by knowing something you don’t know. So, we made a very simple change – we took the workflow that we were already doing, right, the process that we already had – and we just represented it graphically with Trello.
Luke Kanies on hacking culture, devopsdays 2013 Portland
Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don’t Understand by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Nassim Nicholas Taleb comes off as an asshole. Much of what he asserts as new or original material is simply redefining concepts like resilience or robustness as slightly less than I had learned them, although that may have more to do with my time spent in social work. Nevertheless, there are some decent points in this book. I think I’d give Taleb’s work about as much shrift as Simon Sinek’s, and in much the same way – read (or watch) a summary and you’ll probably come away as enlightened as you would having mauled the corpus entire.
The following quotes have all been taken from The Wayback Machine as David’s post has been removed multiple times from various of his blogs and it’s just easier.
So the architect’s job, and one that does get overlooked from time to time, is to go through the system design from many different perspectives and check that everything is still as good as you think it will be from different viewpoints. Remember that everyone else is busy beavering away on their various ‘next level up or down’ so you had better keep your head above the gopher hole.
[…]
…architects can sometimes be like old army generals at a war college, in that they keep trying to fight the last war even if the battlefield has changed.
The rather tired but still relevant analogy is how an airline pilot does things different from a software architect. The two pilots sit at the front and ticks off a series of mundane sounding items (Flaps 10% – Check, APU standby – Check, Nice Hat at Rakish Angle – Check etc) even though they do this every single day of their lives, while an architect would happily do all this from memory even though they do it every 2 years. The difference isn’t in the brain power of the pilot vs the architect, it’s in the relevance importance of forgetting something. A slow web page hasn’t ever killed 200 people, just annoyed them.
[…]
…nearly always by making an ‘embedding’ decision you are actually changing the systems requirements in a way that might not be obvious at the time. If you don’t have the mandate to make that sort of compromise then the inflexibility of a buy decision can be painful. You can get a lot out of buying components or frameworks but you must quickly shift into the attitude of knowing where the sweet spots are – in other words, ‘Stay On The Path’. There comes a time where you stretch the original metaphor so far with what you bought that you just need to hold you hands up and say ‘enough’. It seems to be a harder decision to drop a bought subsystem or framework that it is to first adopt one.
[…]
For the rest of us that don’t actually day-to-day need to use the systems we develop then need to form some sort of relationship with people that do. I don’t have a table of stats to show you but I personally have a deep feeling that software projects fail in two main ways:
(a). The system doesn’t work that well.
(b). The system works well but doesn’t do what you need it to do.
By and large it’s mainly always (b) in that it missed the need of what is actually useful. But it seems that we as an industry seem to concentrate our collective brain power on solving (a) much more though. The Agile approaches seems to at least attempt swing the game back into admitting that we can’t really go that long before doing the wrong thing, but in my limited experience, it often seems to just accept that this developer-domain gap exists as an unavoidable ‘tax’ to be amortatized over a short set of more rapid releases.
You can go either way with trying to understand the domain problems as a software architecture. You can choose to fully surround yourself with them in an attempt to understand them more, or you can trying to step right back and just call them ‘Widgets’. The danger with not getting involved with the business requirements is that it is tragically easy just to hear what you think are justifications for the architecture you have in mind. This problem is also compounding with the fact that if it takes 6 months to gather the requirements then they are probably not going to be correct in six months time. Requirements are a 4-dimensional problem.
The first part of my tip for the software architecture in terms of the requirements is to at least spend as much time listening to the users as you do your implementation team. Also try to actively look for aspects of the system you know are difficult to implement and go around with active questioning on those early on.
[…]
David himself has complained that he sounds dated, that most of these points have been better made elsewhere, etc., yet each time I read the piece I find new value in it.
More readings on Architecture.
sdmouton dot wordpress 
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