Notes for week 41 of 2022

It’s the performance review time! One of those things that I used to hate, and now I appreciate them. This can totally be a time consuming bullshit or an improvement done well.

It’s my first time when I am trying to strictly adhere to a framework, SBI this time (Situation-Behavior-Impact). It’s an interesting experience: I learned to like how it avoids defensive reflexes in most people by focusing on the situation and responses as opposed to judging the person, but I also find it limiting when I want to express a long-term, repeating behaviors. I am interested in how it will work after more rounds of the complete feedback loop will be completed.

It’s week three of a manflu and I am annoyed about that.

Random

• I spent quite a bit of time thinking about what’s wrong about the Kafka Outbox Pattern. It’s probably worth a separate blog post, but short version is that if Kafka can’t be treated as a reliable enough piece of infrastructure like a database, a lot of its benefits are going down
• I’ve been asked again to share my productivity toolkit; I have three failed drafts about it from the past, I may give it another push
• Steampipe | select * from cloud;
• Minimum description length
• Paragraph segmentation for English may solve some of my reading issues
• Minto Pyramid as a concept for conveying information: looks like a useful framework to play with
• Dragonfly: a replacement for Redis and Memcached
• https://shopify.engineering/capturing-every-change-shopify-sharded-monolith
• Make-A-Video
• I’ve walked 20 km. I’ve been active for 4.8 hours during 4 activities. This week’s max speed was 39.6 km/h and I conquered 709 elevation meters.

Book Reviews

The Sandman: Overture

What made Morpheus so weak that he could be captured by a mere human at the beginning of the Sandman as we know him? That’s the story Neil finally gets to tell.

I am a huge fan of the original series, but for some reason, this worked much less for me. I think it has something to do with aversion to power creep, a common thing in the fantasy series. If the story is about power growth, the initial story arc is reasonable—but in order to keep the story interesting, authors inevitably end with characters battling demi-Gods and Gods, or becoming ones, and traveling through time and multiverses. In 21st century, that’s just being lazy.

Sandman is not a story about power creep. But this is a story that starts (very limited spoiler alert) with traveling through galaxies and looking at the end of Universe. I think this is what gave me the “over the top” feeling, and not a good one. Art is still nice, and I’ve like the idea of unfoldable pages.

Add one star if you are a cat person, although you’ll be far from dreaming about a thousand cats.

Gaiman, N, Williams, J, Klein, T. The Sandman: Overture. DC Comics; 2016. Rating: 3/5. The Goodreads page.

The Prague Cemetery

As a medieval fresco, this works perfectly and is worth five stars. Eco is again doing his research, and his walkthrough of a particularly interesting historical period is educational. However, this time, I felt like the Prague Cemetery is falling behind as a novel. I found myself reaching for the proverbial encyclopedia for background research quite often, and I don’t consider it a good thing. With a lot of the previous books, I only did that after I finished reading because I wanted the story to continue; in this case, not so much.

Add a star if you’re primarly interested in the history aspect, and another star if you’re already an expert on this history period and able to read through the layers that Eco prepared for you on the first (or second) try.

ECO, Umberto. Pražský hřbitov. Praha: Argo, 2011. ISBN 978-80-257-0487-5. Rating: 3/5. The Goodreads page.