mikal – Page 4 – Made by Mikal

Argo CD in practice

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 10, 2024
Post category:Book

I guess it's no surprise that work uses Argo CD, so it seemed like time to understand it a bit better. Unfortunately this book has what I have come to expect from Packt publishing -- it could do with a more solid editorial pass to be honest. The English in the book is awkward, and a simple grammar pass by an experienced editor would have made a big improvement to the whole book. Worse, its clear little technical review occurred either, there is at least one case where a Kubernetes YAML field is typo'ed in the text and simply wont work as published. As an aside, I went and looked at my technical bookshelf, and I have literally zero books from Packt that I've bothered to keep. I am very close to just stopping buying books published by them. This book starts with an introduction to Kubernetes, which is a bit repetitive if you already use it. Given Kubernetes is a prerequisite for using Argo CD, it certainly seems like that will be the case for many readers. Explaining Kubernetes makes sense in the context of explaining where Argo CD fits in, but I can't help but think there should…

Exit Strategy

Post author:mikal
Post published:September 8, 2024
Post category:Book

Another really good if a bit short book. My only real criticism of the first four books in this series is they really should have been one book.

Rogue Protocol

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 29, 2024
Post category:Book

The third installment in the murderbot series. Another fun if a bit short read. Honestly these books should all have been a single volume. That's the only way I don't enjoy these books -- they're super expensive for their length.

Hands-on Ethical Hacking and Network Defense

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 25, 2024
Post category:Book

This is the textbook for a course I am doing at the moment. To be honest the book is kind of old and nothing special, but I read it so it gets at least a brief mention here. Overall the book is too dated to be particularly useful, and I find it hard to believe that something better hasn't been published in the intervening 11 years. That said, if I ever need to enumerate NetWare servers (remember those?) I'll know where to look for information!

Reactions to a history of block storage at Amazon EC2

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 23, 2024
Post category:EC2

This is an interesting read about the history of the EBS subsystem in Amazon EC2. This quote particularly stands out to me: What I didn’t realize until I joined Amazon, and seems obvious in hindsight, is that you can design an organization much the same way you can design a software system. Different algorithms have different benefits and tradeoffs in how your organization functions. Where practical, Amazon chooses a divide and conquer approach, and keeps teams small and focused on a self-contained component with well-defined APIs.

Artificial Condition

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 23, 2024
Post category:Book

Another short and fun sci-fi read. Our favorite anxious and depressed murderbot is off trying to solve the mystery of why in fact he murdered all those nice people. Along the way he meets a mildly annoying but actually kind of friendly AI transport ship with a lot of unexplained capabilities. Definitely worth a couple of winter evenings to read.

Children of Time

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 19, 2024
Post category:Book

While being a fairly transparent metaphor for refugees, this book is also an excellent read with a relatively believable premise. I especially like the ending, which I thought was quite unexpected. I don't want to ruin any of this for anyone, but I really really enjoyed this book.

Everything is Obvious, Once You Know The Answer

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 13, 2024
Post category:Book

This is a book about common sense. Specifically, it's about how when you're told a fact it seems obvious -- common sense -- that it's true. Interestingly, this can be the case even if that fact is in fact untrue. This is at least partially because common sense is mostly practical, that is it's more concerned about "getting to the right answer", preferably quickly, than it is about exactly how it got to that answer. It's also partially because common sense is cultural, we map new situations to things we've seen previously to infer the correct answer. Different cultures have different experiences and so therefore have different common sense. The book spends a chapter discussing the ways that humans make decisions, and how logic isn't really the answer. We instead imagine ourselves in the projected situation and then work through what will happen. This means that we're bad at seeing attempts to anchor our thinking, or other forms of bias. We also tend to think that incentives will work better than they actually do in the real world. That is, we are bad at predicting what factors will be important in someone's decision making process and then apply ineffective incentives.…

The Kubernetes Book (2024 edition)

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 6, 2024
Post category:Book

This is yet another accidental purchase of a self-published book, although I think this one makes a lot of sense as a self published work. Writing a technical reference book isn't a particularly lucrative pastime for most authors, and self publishing likely makes it more worthwhile than the traditional publisher route, especially if you can rustle up a good set of technical editors and reviewers yourself. That said, I think one of the risks with self published technical books like this is that they are overly credulous, and I think this book falls into that trap early by describing Kubernetes as the "cloud operating system". Like I get it, you're excited about Kubernetes, but making claims that all of the cloud runs on Kubernetes just undermines your work before you've even really started. I can't find any public data, either academic or anecdotal, which supports the assertion that Kubernetes is even the most popular way to run workloads in clouds. I'm sure that AWS has more VMs not running Kubernetes for example than they do have running it. That said, it is clear at this point that Kubernetes is the dominant player for container clustering. So why not just say…

All Systems Red

Post author:mikal
Post published:August 5, 2024
Post category:Book

This book was a short but fun read. Sufficiently short in fact that perhaps it was a little over priced, but not outrageously so. It follows an adventure of a slightly rogue but generally nice cyborg SecUnit which has charmingly named itself MurderBot. That's confusing, because said cyborg is too busy being depressed and anxious to actually do much murdering. I will definitely read the sequels.