There is a pretty cool Twitter thread by Sarah Mei, starting at

Thread

I spammed into this at /14 .

@samphippen :

Big secret: there exist vast tranches of business contexts in which having literally zero tests is fine.

@sarahmei :

Been thinking about this. Conventional wisdom says you need a comprehensive set of regression tests to go green before you release code. /1

You want to know that your changes didn’t break something elsewhere in the app. But there are ways to tell other than a regression suite. 2/

NPR has an article about the measles. It is already known that after a measles infection the immune system goes down for a few weeks and followup infections are common. It seems that what the infection does is worse than that. With the introduction of measles vaccination it has been observed that other infections went down within 2-3 years after measles immunization took place. Researchers wanted to know why and found evidence that

Tony Seba (Stanford University) came up with a kind of best-case scenario for electrification and decarbonization. “Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030 ” sees a self-amplifiying change in how we travel and transport things:

By 2030, within 10 years of regulatory approval of autonomous vehicles (AVs), 95% of U.S. passenger miles traveled will be served by on-demand autonomous electric vehicles owned by fleets, not individuals, in a new business model we call “transportas-a-service” (TaaS). The TaaS disruption will have enormous implications across the transportation and oil industries, decimating entire portions of their value chains, causing oil demand and prices to plummet, and destroying trillions of dollars in investor value — but also creating trillions of dollars in new business opportunities, consumer surplus and GDP growth.

Fefe had a short pointer to an article Patching is Hard . It is, but you can make it a lot easier by doing a few things right. I did s small writeup (in German ) to explain this, which Fefe posted.

I do have an older talk on this, titled “8 rollouts a day” (more like 30 these days). There are slides and a recording . The Devops talk “Go away or I will replace you with a little shell script” addresses it, too, but from a different angle (slides , recording ).

So Microsoft had a bug in their systems. Many of their sytems. For many years. That happens. People write code. These people write bugs. Microsoft over the years has become decently good with fixing bugs and rolling out upgrades, quickly. That’s apparently important, because we all are not good enough at not writing bugs. So if we cannot prevent them, we need to be able to fix them and then bring these fixes to the people. All of them.

“Canary Skill Endorsements ”: If you see them being used in a letter sent to you by a recruiter, you go all Van Halen when they spot a brown M&M .

APNIC discusses different TCP congestion control algorithms , coming from Reno, going through CUBIC and Vegas, then introducing BBR (seems to be a variation on CoDel) and what they observed when running BBR in a network with other implementations.

TCP congestion control algorithms try to estimate the bandwidth limit of a multi-segment network path, where a stream crosses many routers. Each segment may have a different available capacity. Overloading the total path (that is, the thinnest subsegment of the path) will force packet drops by overloading the buffers of the router just in front of that thin segment. That in turn requires retransmits, which is inefficient and has nasty delays.

It’s not my fault, really. It’s Schenker , and Urban Games . They sent me my Nvidia 1070 (with a side of CPU and Memory), and now there is a Windows Shoebox (well, Clown Shoe sized showbox) somewhere in our home, and Steam Streaming is busy. I’m off laying tracks with the family, now the screen updates are not jumpy any more.

XMG Prime

A talk by Marco te Brömmelstroet and others about how neither the Bike nor the train themselves are a viable transport alternative, but how they together are much more than the sum of their parts:

Nine Arguments for seeing bicycle-train as one mobility system

Biking increases the catchment area of train stations, allowing an increase of the distance between stops for stop-trains, and consequently also for all higher-order trains. This speeds up the train system, making it a lot more attractive and a lot more viable. Both bike-use and train-use increase, making the high-density urban environment more liveable and attractive as well.

When dealing with Kubernetes, you will inevitably have to deal with config and data that is in JSON format. jq is a cool tool to handle this, but while the man page is complete, it is also very dry. A nice tutorial can be found at The Programming Historian, which uses some real world use cases. My personal use case is Converting JSON to CSV , and the inverse of that . There also is a mildly interesting FAQ . Learning jq takes about one quiet afternoon of time.