One of my biggest pet peeves, when it comes to incident management and response, is the term “the root cause”.
At best it feels naïve, at worst downright harmful - this notion that there is a singular “root cause” that we can just dig down to, and if we find that, then we’ve cracked it.
Incidents, even the simplest, tend to come from a complex web of context and considerations.
(Disclaimer: This is a minimally-edited version of a midnight rant on Discord. Do not expect a particularly nuanced take, this does not reflect my usual level of compassion and empathy, I’m sure the standards authors are smart and wonderful people and I benefit from their work etc.)
I’m sure the spec authors are smart and reasonable upstanding people who believe they are making the world a better place but with all due respect USB-C can absolutely get in the sea. Or at least I wish some very stubbed toes upon people.
There was a brief shining period in my life when USB felt good. I felt like I understood it, I felt like I could trust it. It was simple.
One of my favourite questions to ask in an initial job interview/screening is this:
What attracted you to the role with us?
Plus the absolutely vital follow-up:
(“I want a new job and yours didn’t sound completely awful” is an entirely reasonable answer!)
That second part is key.
I love reading. When I was younger this was a bit of a problem - my parents had to move my dad’s Stephen King horror books because I’d start reading them as soon as I’d grown tall enough to reach the shelf - or the time I asked “mummy what’s a murder” because I would read old newspapers left around for recycling.
But I’ve found so much joy through reading - and even though today for various reasons I don’t read as much as I used to, it’s still one of the best ways for me to pick up information.
I read quickly (e.g. Lord of the Rings in about a week at around 10 years old). This is almost certainly a huge factor in my enjoyment. I don’t know how exactly I do this or where learned this; I think I taught myself at a fairly young age. But an indirect benefit, other than the obvious speed itself, is that it makes it very low cost to try out a book/series - it doesn’t take me much time or effort to get through enough to decide if I want to continue!
I really love “development tooling”; there’s so many things - from static analysers to formatters to test infrastructure and more - that help me catch problems and potential issues early. I use enough tooling, and create just enough Python projects, to want a convenient reference and starting point.
So I’ve set up a GitHub template repository at https://github.com/doismellburning/python-template/
Features include:
I really like Read the Docs - a great documentation hosting platform, free for open source and community projects.
I really like Pipenv for managing my Python project dependencies.
Unfortunately Read the Docs have decided to not support Pipenv. This is perfectly reasonable of them - it’s their service, and everything they decide to support incurs a cost. Alas it’s not quite ideal for me!
Fortunately both tools provide useful compatibility features that make it pretty straightforward to get them working together:
“Netlify CMS is an open source content management system for your Git workflow that enables you to provide editors with a friendly UI and intuitive workflows”. Note that it’s entirely orthogonal to the Netlify hosting platform - using one doesn’t commit you to the other, but there’s definitely some convenience factor from using both together.
I just added it to this blog and I really like it!
Denise Yu’s great thread covers a fundamental yet often overlooked ability, and provides practical ways to deploy it:
I joined Twitter back in 2010 and have loved it. Like so many of these things, I find you get from it what you put in, and over the years I put in lots of effort curating my timeline so that I followed a fantastic selection of people and groups that brought me knowledge and joy.