Notes for week 10 of 2022

Not much to talk about publicly. I am still onboarding into my new team and working on improving our hiring. I realized I forgot how only mildly compatible I became with Scrum planning; this is one of the tensions I’ll have to resolve.

Somehow, I also became partially responsible for spinning up our permissions team. If you are into having a chance for a greenfield design of a nontrivial permissions system, taking into concerns identity federation, cross-service user authorization and public API security design, let me know!

Spring has officially started at least by the recorded amount of cyclists per kilometer. Onwards to the more energetic part of the year!

War continues to take a toll. Beside friends having families directly impacted, everybody’s focus and stress levels are all over the place. People also start to react on rising gas prices (which are currently rising way more than the underlying oil price). There are first cracks in solidarity with refugees and signs of politicians using them for political profit. The second-order effects are coming.

Random

• [WARNING] Retrying (Retry(total=2, connect=None, read=None, redirect=None, status=None)) after connection broken by 'NewConnectionError('<urllib3.connection.HTTPSConnection object at 0x7f8f9d915050>: Failed to establish a new connection: [Errno 110] Connection timed out')': /api/1243268/envelope/ is a weird error that I started getting on Graveyard and I have no idea where from. Logging without tracing is only mildly useful.
• I’ve walked 24 km. I’ve been active for 5.1 hours during 5 activities. This week’s max speed was 22.4 km/h and I conquered 208 elevation meters.

Recommended Readings From This Week

• Who Owns My Name?: On being dragged by circumstances, except circumstances being people making decisions.
• The Seven Habits That Lead to Happiness in Old Age: Happiness 401(k)
• Situation Report: The Unreality of Money: Crypto keeps giving. The origin analysis rings true.
• Finality does not exist in payments: Fun as usual from Patrick. How definitive are your payment transactions?
• “Turning the database inside out with Apache Samza” by Martin Kleppmann: Good intro not only for Samza, but for log-based systems in general
• More alcohol, less brain: Study finds an association that begins with an average of just one drink a day: “in 50-year-olds, as average drinking among individuals increases from one alcohol unit (about half a beer) a day to two units (a pint of beer or a glass of wine) there are associated changes in the brain equivalent to aging two years”. There is also some evidence of every drink being exponentially worse and not having the last drink making a lot of difference.
• The Rules for Rulers: How motivations are differently aligned in various systems and what rules have to take into account
• The Insane Engineering of James Webb Telescope: Insane indeed, uranium and gold plates?
• Tether: The Story So Far: I am still fascinated by the layers of crypto fraud.