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.