October

This month I learned

• Truck Factor (TF) is a tool to identify concentration of knowledge in software development environments. It states the minimal number of developers that have to be hit by a truck (or quit) before a project is incapacitated.¹

Reading

Having more time on my hands this month I spent some time reorganizing my newsletter subscriptions and blogs I follow. Where possible, I switched from email newsletter to RSS feed subscriptions to adopt a pull model (instead of push) for reading. Now my email inbox stays pristine and reading new articles is a deliberate action that requires me to open the Reeder app and refresh subscribed feeds. While at it, I cought up with a few blogs I haven’t read in a while and a lot of open tabs - mostly links from Hacker News. Following is a list of the best picks for this month:

• Australia/Lord_Howe is the weirdest timezone fun read and a nice primer to how computers store and resolve time zone data.
• We built our house for LAN parties (Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties) is a teenage-dream come true house setup for LAN parties.
• A short story called The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke.
• Machines of Loving Grace by Raegan Bird is a moving read about birth, child loss, and technological interventions.
• How I ship projects at big tech companies boils down to ship often and ownership but one highlight that stayed with me is:

  a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped

Watching

“Performance Matters” by Emery Berger (YouTube) - why performance matters and how to measure it properly.

Listening

In New Zealand we have spent a lot of time driving. I myself don’t mind driving in silence but Iris prefers to have something on so we settled on listening to podcasts. Our current favorite is People I (Mostly) Admire by Steven D. Levitt. Steven brings wide variety of hosts, from book authors to scientists and researchers which makes every podcast unique.

We have gone through 20 episodes during our sabbatical, each unique and fun in its own. Among those that I enjoyed the most is for example episode How to Grow a White Rhino with Thomas Hildebrandt; as German and dry as it gets but wholesome at the same time. The other 2 picks I would highly recommend is Richard Dawkins on God, Genes, and Murderous Baby Cuckoos and The Language of the Universe.