Category: Worth Reading

Just in case you were recently promoted to be a team leader or a manager: read these somewhat-tongue-in-cheek advices:

• How do I feel worthwhile as a manager when my people are doing all the implementing? by Charity Majors
• The Non-psychopath’s Guide to Managing an Open-source Project by Kode Vicious.

Need more career advice? How about The Six Year Rule by Bryan Sullins… or you could go and reread my certifications-related blog posts.

Something to keep in mind before you start complaining about the crappy state of network operating systems: people are still finding hundreds of bugs in C and C++ compilers.

One might argue that compilers are even more mission-critical than network devices, they’ve been around for quite a while, and there might be more people using compilers than configuring network devices, so one would expect compilers to be relatively bug-free. Still, optimizing compilers became ridiculously complex in the past decades trying to squeeze the most out of the ever-more-complex CPU hardware, and we’re paying the price.

In January 2018 Rodney Brooks made a series of long-term predictions about self-driving cars, robotics, AI, ML, and space travel. Not surprisingly, his predictions were curmudgeonly and pessimistic when compared to the daily hype (or I wouldn’t be blogging about it)… but guess who was right ;)

He’s also the only predictor I’m aware of who is not afraid to compare what he wrote with how reality turned out years down the line. On January 1st he published the 2021 edition of the predictions scorecard and so far he hasn’t been too pessimistic yet. Keep that in mind the next time you’ll be listening to your favorite $vendor droning about the wonders of AI/ML.

From AI is wrestling with a replication crisis (HT: Drew Conry-Murray)

Last month Nature published a damning response written by 31 scientists to a study from Google Health that had appeared in the journal earlier this year. Google was describing successful trials of an AI that looked for signs of breast cancer in medical images. But according to its critics, the Google team provided so little information about its code and how it was tested that the study amounted to nothing more than a promotion of proprietary tech (emphasis mine).

Here’s another riff on the “when you’re the smartest person in the room, change the room” theme: The Trap of The Premature Senior by inimitable Charity Majors. Enjoy!

Did you ever experience an out-of-the-blue BGP session flap after you were running that peering for months? As Dmytro Shypovalov explains in his latest blog post, it’s always MTU (just kidding, of course it’s always DNS, but MTU blackholes nonetheless result in some crazy behavior).

A long while ago I wrote a blog post along the lines of “it’s ridiculous to allow developers to deploy directly to a public cloud while burdening them with all sorts of crazy barriers when deploying to an on-premises infrastructure,” effectively arguing for self-service approach to on-premises deployments.

Not surprisingly, the reality is grimmer than I expected (I’m appalled at how optimistic my predictions are even though I always come across as a die-hard grumpy pessimist), as explained in The Shared Irresponsibility Model in the Cloud by Dan Hubbard.

My friend Marjan Bradeško wrote a great article describing how we tend to forget common sense and rely too much on technology. I would strongly recommend you read it and start thinking about the choices you make when building a network with magic software-intent-defined-intelligent technology from your preferred vendor.

I was telling you there’s no need to become a programmer over six years ago, but of course nobody ever listens to grumpy old engineers… which didn’t stop Ethan Banks from writing another excellent advice on the same theme: Don’t Become A Developer, But Use Their Tools.

We all knew it for a long time, now it’s finally official: IP fragmentation is broken, or as the ever-so-diplomatic IETF likes to call it, IP Fragmentation is Considered Fragile.