I remember reading 'Raising Steam' with more and more alarm and dispair. I loved all the other books, and there was something so obviously going wrong mentally in this book. Dementia sucks.
Strangely, 'The shepherds crown' was much less impacted, even if wikipedia places it a bit later in the timeline.
In my experience, it's a superior approach for code you wrote yourself in a repeatable crash. You have the whole programming language at your disposal for building a condition corresponding to your bug, and any kind of data dumping.
I fall back on debuggers when the environment is hostile: Half understood code from someone else, unreliable hardware (like embedded), or debugging memory dumps.
But before both, the initial approach is thinking deep and hard, and reviewing all available evidence like logs. If this is not enough, I try to add better troubleshooting abilities for the future.
except "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion", and therefore, after each of the 9 tasks is completed, there is no time left for the 10th task. so this only works if the disaster happens very early, or if you do almost all of the tasks in parallel. neither is the expected case.
I tend to have many tasks in parallel, as there are always multiple blocked on input from someone else. E.g.
* 2-3 big programming tasks as focus for this week: I push one forward until I hit a wall, then task switch.
* A backlog of about 5 dumb non-urgent tasks for when the brain is not braining or in meeting filled days.
* 4-5 tasks where I keep asking people questions until the problem is understood. These tend to wake up when receiving information, take priority with 10-30 minutes of writing mails and looking up interesting cases, followed by a few days of waiting for an answer.
In Belgium, Maestro card was halted and my bank switched to MasterCard. Then I paid on some USA website and they managed to pull money from my account based on only the card number, without using the bank website's chip+pin. I was flabberghasted on how we silently managed to get such a huge setback in both security and national independence. I stopped payments using non-EU entities.
If it is pure marketing, I wonder why docker couldn't play the same game and be better at it?
E.g. for your most damning example: If docker published this story, blogged about it, made noice in places like HN, it is exactly what the press would love: RH breaks docker security while claiming to be more secure! The Emperor has no clothes! If you take security serious, accept no fake substitutes!
I always assumed this to be marketing, as reversing the formula has been easy since the '90s. I know someone with acces to a university lab, and he reverses and recreates popular tastes as a hobby. Also, in double blind taste tests, pepsi tends to win from Coca.
Their real genius was always marketing, associating sugar water with freedom, free time, summer AND christmas, ... Not to look down on them, good marketing is both very hard and very powerfull.
In my country, there are little parks where dogs do their business. If you walk with a dog in public places, you are expected to have means for cleanup with you. If your dog soils the road, you're expected to pick it up in a tiny plastic bags and throw it in a garbage can. Violating either rule carries a fine. There is markedly less dog poo than there used to on the roads.
Which demonstrates grandparent's point. There are solutions to the problem. Nobody got rid of the dog, and dogs still pee and poo. There just are technical and legal means to keep the problem managed, even if not perfect.
Where I live, a biking organisation gave out yearly awards for the golden and silver spokes for the best bike adaptions, and the rusted spoke for the most dangerous road setup for bikes. The government rarely collected their rusty award, but the local press loved it. If the government fixed the bad roads, the rusted spoke could be requested back to some smiling official, again for some press attention.
It worked. Fixing your worst road every year and reminding designers not to forget bikers had a remarkedly long term good influence.
Writing this, I wonder if iFixit is planning to take back awards if vendors do better.
That's a really interesting read. I felt myself being closer to John about the small method part, but closer to UB for the TDD part, even if in both cases I was somewhere inbetween.
At the very least, you convinced me to add John's book to my ever-growing reading list.
Strangely, 'The shepherds crown' was much less impacted, even if wikipedia places it a bit later in the timeline.