As per 2022, some things I read in 2023, along with some brief opinions/recommendations.

All categorisations are approximate at best and will probably cause some kind of contention.

As per 2021, some things I read in 2022 (albeit written up nearly two years later), along with some brief opinions/recommendations.

All categorisations are approximate at best and will probably cause some kind of contention.

As per 2020, some things I read in 2021 (albeit written up nearly three years later), along with some brief opinions/recommendations.

I still wasn’t travelling much in 2021, which disrupted when/how I usually read, and this left me in a bit of a reading funk. But despite the delay I figured I’d catch up, and I definitely enjoyed looking back!

All categorisations are approximate at best and will probably cause some kind of contention.

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!