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Using a Cryptographic Chain of Trust to Ensure Accountability for Script Authors and Software Running in the Enterprise

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Let's be honest—who hasn't run a script without fully understanding what it does or the risks involved?

Developers and tech enthusiasts hate having their hands tied by licensing restrictions or insufficient permissions to get their work done. Whether at home or working with an informal team, we bypass these obstacles by managing our own servers.

We want to move fast.

It's not that we don't care about security. We're just doing a cost-benefit analysis on the risks. Especially with cloud infrastructure. If we no longer trust a server, we can delete it with a click and spin up a new one in minutes.

Things get much more serious when we're talking about computers in large organizations like schools, hospitals, banks, or government agencies. These corporate machines need strong protection because a carelessly executed script could open the door to malicious actors:

Ransomware
Corporate espionage
Identity theft

Since the majority of computers in large organizations run Windows, that operating system naturally becomes a prime attack vector.

Set-ExecutionPolicy

Windows comes with PowerShell—a powerful automation and configuration solution that combines a command-line interpreter with a scripting language running on the robust .NET runtime.

Good system administrators block PowerShell script execution across their entire computer fleet unless those scripts are signed by their authors.

But does a signed script automatically mean it's secure?

In a corporate environment, IT resource usage is balanced between two competing needs:

Giving employees the tools and freedom they need to do their work
Protecting the organization from misuse of its resources that could harm it

There are many legitimate reasons for PowerShell scripts to run on employee computers. And here's what might surprise you from a security standpoint: the key isn't so much validating that scripts don't contain malware, but rather verifying the identity of the people who wrote them.

We're talking about a "chain of trust." In a fast-moving world where most interactions happen digitally, it's essential to verify who you're dealing with. And honestly, it's trickier than it sounds. Imagine you've been job hunting for a while and a recruiter contacts you about a position at a well-known company. How do you know this recruiter actually works there? How can you verify you're sharing personal information with a legitimate company representative instead of a scammer? Picture the disaster of handing over your banking details, social security number, or even deciding to relocate for a fictional job!

In the Microsoft world, the challenge of reliably identifying the source of software products is solved by an integrated asymmetric cryptography solution. The Authenticode tool, and now the managed service Azure Artifact Signing, offers an exceptionally user-friendly code signing service. Best of all, end users don't need to do anything to validate these signatures.

Microsoft Azure, through the managed service Azure Artifact Signing, orchestrates the steps for creating a chain of trust:

Azure validates the script creator's identity by requesting specific information like a company identifier (tax number, DUNS number, etc.) and proof of identity
Azure generates a certificate tied to the company's identity
The developer signs their script with this certificate and distributes it to internal or external partners
Any Windows machine can see this signature and trace the chain of trust back to the legally accountable organization that created it.

Accountability is what this signature guarantees.

And that's why, beyond just being convenient, it's genuinely valuable in an enterprise:

No special import needed — trusted right out of the box on all Windows machines
Fully auditable — security teams can see exactly who signed what and when
Revocable — if a certificate is compromised, Microsoft can revoke it and all scripts signed with it immediately become untrusted
Tamper-proof — timestamping proves when the script was signed, even after the certificate expires

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                            AUTHOR PHASE                                     │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                                             │
│  ┌──────────────────┐          ┌──────────────────┐      ┌───────────────┐  │
│  │ Script Author    │          │Digital Signature │      │  .ps1 File    │  │
│  │                  │          │                  │      │               │  │
│  │ Creates .ps1     │─────────▶│ Sign with        │─────▶│ Script body + │  │
│  │ Holds private    │  Script  │ private key      │      │ Signature     │  │
│  │ key/ use managed |          │ (SHA256 hash)    │      │ block         │  │
│  │ service          │   Key    │                  │      │               │  │
│  └──────────────────┘          └──────────────────┘      └───────────────┘  │
│                                                                             │
│  ┌──────────────────┐                                                       │
│  │ Code Signing     │◀─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─           │
│  │ Certificate      │  (Includes cert details in signature block)           │
│  │                  │                                                       │
│  │ Public key       │                                                       │
│  │ embedded in sig  │                                                       │
│  └──────────────────┘                                                       │
│                                                                             │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
                                      │
                                      │
                                      ▼
                        ┌──────────────────────┐
                        │  DISTRIBUTION PHASE  │
                        │                      │
                        │ Share via email,     │
                        │ repo, or network     │
                        └──────────────────────┘
                                      │
                                      │
                                      ▼
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                          EMPLOYEE/EXECUTOR PHASE                            │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                                             │
│  ┌──────────────────┐    PowerShell Validation    ┌──────────────────────┐  │
│  │ Employee         │────────────────────────────▶│ Signature Check      │  │
│  │                  │                             │                      │  │
│  │ Receives script  │                             │ 1. Hash script       │  │
│  │ file             │                             │ 2. Decrypt with      │  │
│  │                  │                             │    public key        │  │
│  └──────────────────┘                             └──────────────────────┘  │
│                                                            │                │
│  ┌──────────────────┐                                      │                │
│  │ Root CA Trust    │◀─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ─ ┘      |                │
│  │ Store            │  (Verify cert chain & revocation)    |                │
│  │                  │                                      |                │
│  │ Verify cert      │                                      |                │
│  │ chain validity   │                                      |                │
│  └──────────────────┘                                      |                │
│                                                            │                │
│                                                            ▼                │
│                                                  ┌──────────────────┐       │
│                                                  │ Signature Valid? │       │
│                                                  └──────────────────┘       │
│                                                            │                │
│                                      ┌─────────────────────┘                │
│                                      │                                      │
│                            YES       │                NO                    │
│                                      ▼                                      │
│                         ┌──────────────────────┐   ┌──────────────────┐     │
│                         │ Execute Script       │   │ Reject/Warn      │     │
│                         │ ✓ Trusted author     │   │ Script blocked   │     │
│                         │ ✓ Not modified       │   │ Not executed     │     │
│                         └──────────────────────┘   └──────────────────┘     │
│                                                                             │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

translated from french by AI -- Claude Haiku 4.5

Aerial Curiosity

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A glass of champagne in hand. Sunk deep into a plush airplane seat. You start to think you’ve finally got it all figured out.

On board a private business jet

YOUNGER EXEC: Q3 was even better than Q2.

OLDER EXEC: Yeah.

YE: Our strategy paid off.

OE: (amused) What strategy?

YE: Well...

OE: Doing what everyone else does, maybe that’s a strategy.

YE: You’re cynical.

OE: (silence)

YE: There’s someone down there.

OE: Where?

YE: Down there.

OE: Yeah.

YE: What’s he doing?

OE: Minding his own business.

YE: He probably doesn’t even have internet.

OE: Probably not.

YE: You’re making fun of me. Anyway, I bet he doesn’t have electricity, running water, a car, or even a grocery store.

OE: Yeah.

YE: Yeah?

OE: He’s probably a hermit or a survivalist. Doesn’t give a damn about the rest of the world.

YE: That’s insane. That can’t be real.

OE: Well (pointing down, pressing his right index finger against the window)

YE: We have to do something. I need to save him.

OE: How do you plan on doing that?

YE: I’ll parachute down there. And I’ll drop a pallet of essentials: a generator, a satellite modem, all kinds of food, a 72-inch 8K TV.

OE: Why?

YE: To show him everything he’s missing. Everything he needs to be happy.

OE: Nice marketing strategy.

translated from french by ChatGPT-4.1

Just Use PostgreSQL as a Cache Instead of Redis

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I read Martin Heinz’s 2023 blog post “You Don’t Need a Dedicated Cache Service – PostgreSQL as a Cache” from start to finish. #DevOps or not, I tested the implementation to see what it gave back.

The dark side of a passion for technology is the risk of adopting ill‑founded beliefs about topics you don’t really master.
For example, I read a post on Hackernews about the PostgreSQL database system. Apparently PostgreSQL can also act as a cache subsystem (think Redis) and even as a message broker. Win‑win: you get rid of Redis and RabbitMQ and treat yourself to a four‑day workweek.

And PostgreSQL can even tell me when the next bus leaves for Montréal, right?

what are the requirements?

Before annoying everyone with the latest revelation picked up between two mouthfuls of peanut‑butter toast, we need to check if it actually works.

Let's open our eyes and ears and figure out what a cache is and what it requires. A cache like Redis is a system that temporarily stores data in memory so it can be retrieved much faster than if we had to go fetch it from the primary database.

So it’s a bit rich to say we’re going to use a database to cache items.
Still, we note that cached items are stored temporarily and the primary quality of a cache subsystem is read performance.

Then for the “temporary” aspect, we need a mechanism that frees items from memory after some time.

the truth is in the blog

The trick is to stretch breakfast by eating a banana or some berries. That way you can go further than the catchy headline of a blog post and learn more.

CREATE UNLOGGED TABLE cache (
    id serial PRIMARY KEY,
    key text UNIQUE NOT NULL,
    value jsonb,
    inserted_at timestamp);

First, it’s not plug‑and‑play. The first step is pretty simple. Create an SQL table called cache and mark it UNLOGGED. An UNLOGGED table doesn’t write its updates to the WAL (write‑ahead log), which makes it faster but means it can lose its contents if the server crashes.

Not too scary, right?

Next, to make sure items don’t bloat the cache table, we need to implement some sort of TTL mechanism.
Martin Heinz suggests using the pg_cron extension to schedule jobs that will call a stored procedure to delete every item older than the given parameter.

Just the words “stored procedure” give me the same feeling as Proust’s madeleine.

In 2026, imagine your least grumpy DevOps engineer showing the new wave of developers how fun a stored procedures in a SQL database can become in the long term.

Putting toothpaste back in the tube is harder than landing a rocket vertically, isn’t it?

SWOT on Martin Heinz’s proposal

strengths

Your DevOps team is barely keeping its head above water. You already have PostgreSQL servers on hand. In less than a morning they can spin up a cache table with TTL logic and hand it over to developers.

No need to provision new resources or commit themselves to support them.

weaknesses

It’s not Redis. Developers will quickly notice they have to talk to the “cache” through their favorite ORM (or pure SQL transactions).

And they won’t be able to add “Redis” to their résumé.

Also, until proven otherwise, it’ll probably be slower than Redis.

opportunities

With the arrival of the Cloud and managed services, DBAs have vanished. By coaxing your DevOps folks into tinkering with PGSQL, you might sneak in the responsibility for administering the database servers without anyone noticing!

risks

If you know your system is heavily used, needs rock‑solid realtime performance and must scale easily, then don’t let the siren songs of the web seduce you—pick Redis.

Still sounds cool, I want to try

Docker Desktop
git
DBeaver or any IDE that can connect to a pgsql server

If you have those two items (and cannot count), clone my GitHub repo sandboxes and dig in the pgsql-cache directory. Open the README.md file in Preview mode (if you’re not masochistic) and follow the instructions.

I’ve put together a little lab that will provision and configure a PostgreSQL database with a cache table and cron. Then you can run a small C# API that shows how to interact with the pgsql cache.

translated from french by Chatgpt

sources

You Don’t Need a Dedicated Cache Service - PostgreSQL as a Cache

pgsql database used as a cache

Curiosity Will Get Us Out of Trouble

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Curiosity will get us out of trouble. No need to insist or speak louder. But being curious is difficult: we must let others speak, encourage them to express themselves and, above all, listen and learn. Let's admit it: our opinions often come from habit, sometimes from ignorance. In the best case, we have seriously studied a subject. Even then, when someone less well-informed interrupts us, welcoming this interruption with curiosity remains the best strategy.

The word curiosity comes from the Latin curiositas which means care. As for the word care, it probably comes from the Latin somnium which means dream and vision. Like a dream, curiosity is something that occupies the mind without harmful consequence. Much like a dream, the curiosity we experience when learning about someone else's position commits us to nothing. This openness and suspension of our judgment costs us almost nothing.

Being curious is characteristic of children, isn't it? As we progress through life, we lose this ease of wonder. As if admitting our fallibility and ignorance represented a weakness. On the contrary, showing curiosity is an unsuspected strength. Chances are that most of our acquaintances share neither our opinions nor our tastes. Being curious flows naturally from this reality. Humans are different from one another but they must collaborate to achieve noteworthy objectives. By ceasing to try to convince others to adopt our opinions, by showing curiosity and suspending our judgment to understand their situation, we build bridges between us all.

Curiosity is a reasonable bet for surviving the typically human automatisms in discussion. Whether it's interrupting, bringing the conversation back to ourselves, or trying to "score a point" by contradicting the other, we all lose a bit in these aborted conversations. Yet what is the real risk? What is the consequence of a strange dream? We wake up, perhaps a bit shaken, but intact. The same goes for curiosity: listening to opposing opinions commits us to nothing, doesn't really put us in danger.

translated from french by Claude Sonnet 4.5

Mark Carney Davos 2026 Speech: The Power of the Less Powerful Begins with Honesty (Full Transcript)

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Im gonna start in french and then I'll switch back to english.

Merci Larry. C'est un plaisir, c'est un devoir d'être parmi vous en ce point tournant pour le Canada et pour le monde. Et je parlerai aujourd'hui de la rupture de l'ordre mondial. De la fin d'une fiction agréable et du début d'une réalité brutale où la géopolitique des grandes puissances n'est soumise à aucune contrainte.

Mais je vous soumets par ailleurs que les autres pays, en particulier les puissances moyennes comme le Canada, ne sont pas impuissantes.

Ils possèdent la capacité de construire un nouvel ordre qui intègre nos valeurs comme le respect des droits humains, le développement durable, la solidarité, la souveraineté et l'intégrité territoriale des États. La puissance des moins puissants commence par l'honnêteté.

[socdev's translation: Thank you Larry. It is a pleasure and a duty to be with you for this turning point for Canada and for the world. Today I'm gonna be talking about the rupture of the world order. About the end of a comfortable fiction and about the beginning of a brutal reality where the geopolitics of the great powers is bounded by any constraints. But I'll propose nevertheless that other countries, specifically the middle powers like Canada, are not powerless. They are capable of building a new order interwoven by our values like the respect of human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and the territorial integrity of the States. The power of the less powerful begins with honesty.]

switching back to english

It seems like every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. That

"the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must"

[note: The Melian Dialogue by the Greek historian Thucydides recounts how Athens, the European hegemonic power at the time, took possession of a small island in the Cyclades. It is a classic of ancient literature often studied in political philosophy, argumentation theory, and philosophical anthropology. Though the Melians had ancestral ties to Sparta, they were neutral in the war. Athens invaded Melos in the summer of 416 BC and demanded that the Melians surrender and pay tribute to Athens or face annihilation. The Melians refused, so the Athenians laid siege to their city. Melos surrendered in the winter, and the Athenians executed the men of Melos and enslaved the women and children.(Wikipedia)]

This aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety.

It won’t. So, what are our options?

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. In it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? His answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world, unite!” He doesn't believe it. No one believes it. But he places the sign anyway — to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists. Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this “living within a lie.” The system’s power comes not from its truth but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source: when even one person stops performing — when the greengrocer removes his sign — the illusion begins to crack.

Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down. For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, praised its principles, and benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct: we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.

But more recently, great powers began using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot “live within the lie” of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination. The multilateral institutions on which middle powers relied, the WTO — the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat.

As a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions. That they must develop greater strategic autonomy: in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance, and supply chains. And this impulse is understandable. A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself, or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.

But let us be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable. And there is another truth: if great powers abandon even the pretence of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from ‘transactionalism’ will become harder to replicate.

Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. They'll buy insurance. Increase options. This rebuilds sovereignty—sovereignty which was once grounded in rules—but which will be increasingly anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.

This room knows this is classic risk management. Risk management comes at a price. But that cost of strategic autonomy, of sovereignty, can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortress. Shared standards reduce fragmentation. Complementarities are positive sum. The question for middle powers, like Canada, is not whether to adapt to this new reality. We must. The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls — or whether we can do something more ambitious.

Now Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture. Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security is no longer valid. Our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb has termed ‘values-based realism’ — or, to put it another way, we aim to be both principled and pragmatic.

Principled in our commitment to fundamental values: sovereignty and territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter, the respect for human rights.

Pragmatic in recognising that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values. So we are engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for the world as we wish it to be. Canada is calibrating our relationships, so their depth reflects our values. And we are prioritising broad engagement to maximise our influence, given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this poses, and the stakes for what comes next.

And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also on the value of our strength. We are building that strength at home. Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on incomes, on capital gains and business investment, we have removed all federal barriers to interprovincial trade, and we are fast-tracking a trillion dollars of investments in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors, and beyond. We are doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade [2020-2030] and we are doing so in ways that build our domestic industries. And we are rapidly diversifying abroad. We have agreed a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU [European Union], including joining SAFE [PESCO?], the European’s defence procurement arrangements. We have signed twelve other trade and security deals on four continents in six months.

In the past few days, we have concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We are negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines, and Mercosur. We are doing something else. To help solve global problems, we are pursuing variable geometry, in other words, different coalitions for different issues, based on common values and interests.

So on Ukraine, we are a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per-capita contributors to its defence and security.

On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future [applause]. Our commitment to Article 5 is unwavering. So we are working with our NATO allies including the Nordic Baltic Eight to further secure the alliance’s northern and western flanks, including through Canada's unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft, and boots on the ground. Boots on the ice.

Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.

On plurilateral trade, we are championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trading block of 1.5 billion people.

On critical minerals, we are forming buyer’s clubs anchored in the G7 so that the world can diversify away from concentrated supply. And on AI, we are cooperating with like-minded democracies to ensure we will not ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers.

This is not naive multilateralism. Nor is it relying on their institutions. It is building the coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations. What it's doing is it is creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities.

[I ]Argue [that] the middle powers must act together because if we are not at the table, we are on the menu [laughs]. But I'd also say that great powers can afford for now to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.

In a world of great powers rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: to compete with each other for favour or to combine to create a third path with impact. We should not allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong — if we choose to wield it together.

Which brings me back to Havel.

What does it mean for middle powers to “live the truth”?

First it means naming reality. Stop invoking the “rules-based international order” as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power; rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion. It means acting consistently. Applying the same standards to allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one direction but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign in the window.

It means building what we claim to believe in. Rather than waiting for the old order to be restored, it means creating institutions and agreements that function as described. And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion. That is building a strong domestic economy should always be every government’s priority. And diversification internationally is not just economic prudence; it's a material foundation for honest foreign policy. Because countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability to retaliation.

So Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world’s largest and most sophisticated investors. In other words, we have capital, talent, we also have a government with the immense fiscal capacity to act decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire.

Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse, and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but. A partner that builds and values relationships for the long term. And we have something else: a recognition of what is happening and a determination to act accordingly.

We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is. We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it.

Nostalgia is not a strategy. But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, and more just. This is the task of the middle powers. The countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.

The powerful have their power. But we have something too — the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home, and to act together. That is Canada’s path. We choose it openly and confidently. And it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us.

Thank you very much.

sources

Canada ‘strongly opposes’ tariffs over Greenland, won’t waver on Article 5: Carney

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/articles/Siege_of_Melos

Fiction 2025 — Stories That Let Your Eyes Rest from Netflix

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Diving into fiction nourishes the heart and mind while giving your screen-tired eyes a break. For three of the writers here, I experienced their work most vividly through the author’s own voice on audiobook.

David Sedaris

I stumbled on David Sedaris by accident. I had the wrong name in my head — I was looking for Sam Lipsyte — but the discovery was happy nonetheless. Like Lipsyte, Sedaris is an American humorist who traffics in satirical self-exposure: his books present him as a character, a writer who imagines himself retired and comfortably adrift in France, England, or on a small island off the American East Coast. What makes his work irresistible to me is his willingness to strip himself bare. He offers judgments that are often politically incorrect, sometimes absurd, and always, somehow, deeply human; you can't help but grin.

Worth rereading? Absolutely — especially as audiobooks, read by Sedaris himself.

Titles I've read in 2025: "When You Are Engulfed in Flames" (2008); "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls" (2013); "Calypso" (2018); "Happy-Go-Lucky" (2022)

Sam Lipsyte — The Ask (2010)

Lipsyte teaches fiction at Columbia University in New York City. The Ask follows the bungled career of a socially inept man who works in the major-donations office at a second-tier university in New York.

The novel’s protagonist is a genuine antihero: a man who, from the first page, reveals himself as something of a mess. The book holds your attention through the cringe-comic details of his life and the absurd, oddly tender relationship he has with his son, Bernie.

Worth rereading? Certainly.

Jonathan Ames — Karma Doll (2025)

I am an unabashed fan of Jonathan Ames. I love his characters: flawed, often pitiable men who, nevertheless, possess flashes of brilliance.

"Karma Doll", read on audiobook by Ames himself, reads like a thriller that subverts expectations for those familiar with his New York-set work. Still, it carries the psychological depth characteristic of Ames’s best characters. It is a surprising turn for a longtime reader — and a welcome one.

Worth rereading? Maybe.

William Gibson — Count Zero (1986)

The second novel in the cultish Sprawl Trilogy.

If you enjoyed "Neuromancer", "Count Zero" is a natural next step. It is not a direct sequel: it introduces different characters and a fresh plot, though it unfolds within the same Sprawl universe — a sprawling megalopolis stretching the Eastern Seaboard from Atlanta to Boston, with scenes that extend into space and to satellite communities.

I confess I reread "Neuromancer" before diving back in. That refresher helped me re-enter the particular state of mind the books require: a willingness to accept, at least for a while, that you may not fully understand everything that happens — a bit like life, when we only grasp fragments of the whole.

Gibson’s work rewards rereading. Ahead of his time, he dramatizes the shifting role of humans in an AI-saturated future, prompting reflection on how power consolidates into quasi-dynasties, how work fragments and becomes precarious, and how new hierarchies are established.

Victor-Lévy Beaulieu — Trois-Pistoles et les Basques: Le Pays de mon père (1997)

Presented as a coffee-table book, VLB’s account of his father’s slow decline reads like a borderland between documentary and interior reverie. The narrative moves from a Montreal suburb's town to Trois-Pistoles village passing by an Indigenous reserve, tracing a return to the land of his childhood.

I borrowed the book from the library while planning a trip to the canadian Basque Country. My initial intention was to leaf through the photographs and mark places to visit. Instead I started reading the text—and could not stop until the end.

There are echoes of James Joyce in VLB’s prose: he invites the reader into an imagination that is, at times, unsettling and yet fundamentally sound.

The study of the Alzheimer’s disease representation in Mordecai Richler’s « Barney’s Version », Victor-Lévy Beaulieu’s « Trois-Pistoles et les Basques ». Le pays de mon père and Annie Ernaux’s « Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit » allows us to outline the disease’s literary specifics, beyond the theme of the memory lapse.

To think the Alzheimer’s disease in terms of cognitive degeneration is to evacuate its dimension as a literature material which influences the structure of a text as well as its style. The analysis of three contemporary stories contributes to the identification of rhetorical methods as well as narrative and style strategies which help us to delimit the Alzheimer’s disease literary mark.

We will see that when a third party takes charge of the story, it explains the filiation theme which helps to see the disease from the inside as well as from the outside.It also shows an archiving work.

Marie-France Rooney's Master thesis "Representations of Alzheimer’s Disease in Three Contemporary Narratives"

Hubert Aquin — Next Episode (1965)

Since the Autumn protests of 2012 I have tried, on and off, to finish Hubert Aquin’s "Next Episode". I bought it out of curiosity while I was a student at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), often passing the building that bears his name on my way to seminars or meetings with my thesis advisor.

I probably won’t reread this one. I’d prefer to explore another work by this important Québécois writer.

translated from french by GPT-5 mini --- and it took some liberty to improve my writing ;)

sources

Marie-France Rooney (2014), Représentations de la maladie d’Alzheimer dans trois récits contemporains

Nonfiction 2025 — 3 Eye-Opening Books: Nazi Mercenaries, Neurology, and Modern China

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2025 I read a handful of smart, wide-ranging non-fiction books on history and modern medicine. Poking outside your day job — into history, science, and systems — is a high-return habit: it stretches your thinking and sharpens judgment.

Here are three that stuck with me.

Danny Orbach, Fugitives: The History of Nazi Mercenaries During the Cold War (2023)

Danny Orbach is a military historian with a Harvard pedigree who studies coups, political assassinations, and military insubordination.

Fugitives traces what happened to Nazi officers after 1945. Many who avoided capture fled to Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa and reinvented themselves as military advisers, security trainers, and repression experts. They worked for states from Egypt and Syria to Iraq, the Congo, and various Latin American regimes.

Orbach’s central claim is blunt: Western priorities—chiefly fearing communism—often trumped justice. In practice, that meant experienced perpetrators were useful, and governments quietly recruited their skills. The techniques of control and the architecture of political police learned in Nazi Germany migrated and persisted.

The broader lesson is sobering and practical for anyone who studies systems: violence doesn’t vanish, it relocates to where it’s exploitable. States talk about principles, but they prioritize effectiveness. Read this book if you want a clear-eyed account of how power recycles tools of coercion.

Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: And Other Clinical Tales (1985)

I went on a short neuroscience binge and dug into classic casebooks. Oliver Sacks is a towering humane voice in neurology; he famously inspired the film Awakenings.

This book is a set of clinical portraits: visual agnosia, amnesia, aphasia, loss of bodily sense, Tourette’s, Parkinson’s, hallucinations, and other mind-bending syndromes. Sacks brings philosophy and literature into the clinic—he treats patients as whole people, not just broken modules.

What surprised me most was how often loss triggers adaptation. Many patients don’t seem overtly miserable; they find ways to live richly around their condition. One striking story is of a drummer with Tourette’s who loved the energy his tics gave him—medication flattened his edge and his playing. The clinical trade-offs are real: drugs can reduce symptoms but blunt personality and purpose.

Sacks models a deeply humane medicine: curiosity plus empathy, anchored in broad cultural literacy. If you care about design or product leadership, his work is an object lesson in treating users (or patients) as whole humans, not just inputs and outputs.

Rana Mitter, Modern China: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edition)

This Oxford ‘Very Short Introduction’ isn’t an academic monograph; it’s a concise, readable synthesis aimed at curious readers. Mitter plays with the two terms in his title—‘China’ and ‘modern’—and spends a lot of time asking what modernity actually means for a civilization with millennia of statecraft.

I learned a crisp narrative arc: imperial China’s dynastic rhythms, the fracturing pressures of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the end of the imperial system in 1911, mass mobilizations like the May Fourth movement, the civil war between nationalists and communists, the Japanese invasion, Mao’s era and the Cultural Revolution, and then the post‑Mao economic surge that produced today’s global China.

Mitter resists easy certainties. The book’s strength is making society, economy, and culture intelligible through history, not through headlines. It’s a smart primer if you want historical context without the jargon.

conclusion

All three books repay attention. Orbach sharpens your understanding of how political violence migrates; Sacks reminds you to keep the human in the center of systems thinking; Mitter supplies the historical scaffolding to understand modern China. Read any of these and you’ll come away with better filters for the world.

translated from french by GPT-5 mini --- and it took some liberty to improve my writing ;)

Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, 1959

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

My favorite read of 2025. Between mid-September and mid-October I devoured the 400 pages of this remarkable account, mostly during a few cool October days outside a cabin on the St. Lawrence River while watching freighters pass.

Alfred Lansing, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

In 1914, an expedition led by Sir Ernest Shackleton set out for Antarctica with twenty-six crew members, sixty-nine dogs, and a cat. Their plan was to cross the continent by dog sled. Fate had other plans: the ship became trapped in the ice and the crew spent nearly two years before they returned to civilization.

This book came highly recommended by New York artist Tom Sachs, who summed it up like this:

This is the adventure story by which all other adventure stories are judged. The worst thing that happened was a man losing his feet, but that was only because he didn't have the right shoes.

People read this book again and again because it pulls you out of daily life and drops you into a simple world of ice, sea, and survival.

Immersing yourself in the story makes you feel almost like a crew member. I quickly felt the vertigo of a small human community that can only rely on itself. There is no higher authority beyond the leader, Sir Shackleton, and nature itself.

This is a particularly rich read for those in positions of authority or leadership. For these stranded people, navigation — and equally decision-making, observing the elements (temperature, wind, seasons, currents), and handling conflicts — becomes practical wisdom. You first establish your position, take reliable measurements, then decide with the external factors in mind.

The story also works as a social metaphor: a small group makes critical choices that affect everyone's life. The idea of a minority making weighty decisions can feel uncomfortable. In Shackleton's case, though, you see a leader who acts with humanity and restraint: conflicts happen, but they are managed pragmatically and often admirably.

Who will like this book

Anyone traveling along a large river or the sea.
People who need to show leadership to get projects done. That is, anyone who runs large projects and must mobilize teams.
Entrepreneurs, technical leaders, artists, and even teachers will get value from this book.

I recommend this book to anyone interested in resilience, leadership, and team spirit.

translated from french by Claude AI

stop outsourcing your intelligence to an llm

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

That's the message Leo Herzog wants to get across. He's an IT specialist working at a college in Michigan, and his little website gives us major nostalgia for those sarcastic web apps like lmgtfy or no hello that gently teach people who commit tech faux pas why their behavior is annoying and how to improve it to reduce friction in their communications with us.

The recently launched "Stop Citing AI" site scratches the same itch caused by naive users of new technologies. "Let me Google that for you" (lmgtfy) taught newbies to use a search engine to answer their questions before bothering a friend or coworker with something Google could easily answer. Same deal with "No Hello," which teaches people unfamiliar with asynchronous communication tools like Microsoft Teams or Slack that you shouldn't just ping a colleague with "hello" and then wait for them to respond—instead, write a complete message detailing your request right away and let them reply when they're free.

"Don't copy-paste text from a chatbot and send it to someone as if its response is authoritative."

"Stop Citing AI" takes things a step further into the realm of argumentation theory and epistemology. Since Large Language Models and interactive tools like ChatGPT and Claude became mainstream, we've all noticed the creeping arrival of an annoying form of intellectual laziness. Someone responding to a disagreement falls back on an LLM to get an answer that supports their position. Then they send that response to you, as if it's some kind of slam-dunk argument.

Leo Herzog's website explains, in simplified terms of course, how an LLM works: it produces a sensible response by relying on statistics to predict the next word.

the degradation of critical discussion

The democratization of artificial intelligence seems to have amplified our natural tendency to "want to be right" rather than use our rationality to solve problems and disagreements optimally.

And "Stop Citing AI" is first and foremost a wake-up slap we give ourselves. Those first months with ChatGPT were often great for our egos—getting responses that confirm our opinions and beliefs is fire! Today, we realize that pretty much everyone with beliefs and opinions completely contrary to ours is also getting their positions reinforced. More importantly, by learning how LLM models are produced and how they work, we give ourselves a little reality check and take LLM responses less seriously.

Will I now send the URL "https://stopcitingai.com" to someone trying to prove me wrong with a ChatGPT response?

Nope.

First, because it's sarcastic and probably won't help untangle our disagreement. Second, because it would reveal even greater intellectual laziness on my part and would probably just shut down the discussion.

For healthy argumentation, several factors need to be in place. Both parties must genuinely want to resolve their disagreement optimally for everyone. They need to recognize first that their relationship is more important than their disagreement. The adversarial aspect where there's only a winner and a loser (zero-sum game) must be completely avoided.

I'd recommend first evaluating whether it's worth the effort. If it's not, and your conversation partner is showing intellectual laziness by using ChatGPT to support their position, then don't engage in the discussion.

Otherwise, you need to keep your cool and recognize that a simple copy-paste of a ChatGPT response can in no way be considered an argument. The mental effort required to read and understand an AI citation compared to the effort it took your conversation partner to generate it is wildly unbalanced—don't let them act in such an outrageously unfair way.

Slowing down the exchange and getting them to take responsibility for their side of the debate seems like the right strategy: "Can you summarize in your own words what you just pasted here?"

The study of argumentation theory teaches us an important lesson: the best option is to avoid getting into argumentative debates with just anyone about just anything.

First, it needs to be an issue that's worth debating.

Ultimately, if someone shows laziness by serving you a copy-pasted ChatGPT response, chances are it's not worth your time.

translated from french by Sonnet 4.5

sources

You've been sent here because you cited AI as a source to try to prove something.

Why So Many Leaders Studied Philosophy

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

What do the founder of PayPal, the French president, and a media tycoon have in common?

Peter Thiel (PayPal, Palantir), George Soros, Carl Icahn, Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Bill Clinton, Emmanuel Macron, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, and Rupert Murdoch — successful people in public life who, interestingly, studied philosophy.

I think philosophy trains you to think about big problems at a high level of abstraction. More than a skill, it takes a kind of courage: the courage to seriously consider ideas that make us uncomfortable, or conclusions that challenge our opinions — even our identity.

For the famous names above, that capacity to think clearly about fundamentals, paired with realistic, pragmatic strategy, likely helped push them to the top.

Why we are all equal (and why that causes trouble)

This is the point Thomas Hobbes makes in Leviathan, chapter 13, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity, and Misery.”

People are equal.

Sure, some are stronger physically. But weaker people can join forces and defeat a stronger one.

Most of us think we are smarter than average — and none of us generally wants to be less smart.

“There is almost always no better sign of equality in the distribution of anything than the fact that each is content with his share.”

Competition, mistrust, glory: three sources of conflict

For Hobbes, this equality explains many miseries, including war.

When equals want the same limited goods, some win and some lose. That creates competition: people try to dominate others to get what they want. It creates mistrust: because equals fear for their safety, they try to protect themselves. And it creates glory: people and groups compete for ideals — honor, reputation, traditional values — which fuels conflict.

The art of navigating an imperfect world

“All successful businesses are different: each one acquires a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed businesses are the same: they didn’t escape competition.” — Peter Thiel, Zero to One

In business, Peter Thiel is known for aiming for monopolies. In politics, Pierre Elliott Trudeau defended Canadian unity and order.

Hobbes’s Leviathan proposes that only a state — a rule of law — can cure war and economic misery.

Studying philosophy means daring to think about ideas that often contradict our identity. For Hobbes, that means examining the foundations of society and accepting the need to live under a strong authority.

Defending the power of the state

“The society must use every means at its disposal to defend itself against the emergence of a parallel power which challenges the elected authority in this country.” — Pierre Elliott Trudeau, October Crisis (1970)

This quote shows how a philosopher-politician can apply Hobbes: in times of crisis only a centralized authority can keep order. Trudeau isn’t moralizing — he’s acting in a Hobbesian logic.

But what about ordinary citizens who don’t run states?

Calm and modesty

Here’s the paradox: understanding Hobbes could make you anxious and suspicious. Yet many philosophically trained leaders seem unusually calm.

The key is acceptance. When you stop expecting the world to be fair, you stop being constantly disappointed. When you accept that others keep secrets, you stop feeling personally betrayed.

This clarity isn’t cynicism. It’s seeing the world as it is — and that clarity brings peace of mind.

Intellectual humility as the foundation

A university philosophy education immerses you in big thinkers: Plato in the fall, Aristotle in winter; later Aquinas, Occam, Machiavelli, Descartes, Marx, Rawls, and more.

A philosophy graduate becomes comfortable juggling opposing ideas and, hopefully, gives up dogmatism and fundamentalism.

That exposure builds two essential qualities: the ease of handling contradictory ideas and, crucially, epistemic modesty — the recognition that no single system holds all the truth.

This blend of intellectual humility and Hobbesian clarity likely helped the people we named succeed in finance, entrepreneurship, and politics. Seeing the world as Hobbes did, they used those character traits to their advantage.

Navigating the modern state of nature

Even in modern societies some realities persist.

Information is power. Be discerning: gather information, protect what you know, and be cautious about what you’re told. Rumors and hearsay are often driven by power games. Manipulation and fact distortion are common.

Justice systems are slow and costly. Many social movements rely on shows of force. And acting ethically doesn’t guarantee success.

Calm realism

You can respond to these facts with cynicism or wisdom.

Cynicism abandons ethics in the name of realism. Hobbesian wisdom does the opposite: keep your principles, but stop expecting the world to reward them automatically.

This calm realism lets you study human psychology and history without becoming misanthropic. You can recognize power plays without joining them. You stay humble and cautious without losing the ability to engage.

Hobbes gives us a liberating paradox: by accepting the world’s imperfections, we find the calm to live fully. Not resignation — a clear-eyed serenity.

Maybe that’s the secret shared by Thiel, Soros, Trudeau, and Macron: a philosophical foundation that helps them navigate an imperfect world without losing themselves.

translated from french by a mix of Claude Sonnet 3.5 and ChatGPT-4.1

Sources

Hobbes’s Moral and Political Philosophy

1970: Pierre Trudeau says 'Just watch me' during October Crisis

The Ebb and Flow of Tech

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Comparing the software development lifecycle (SDLC) with the tidal cycle illuminates an obscure aspect of the profession. If you live far from the sea, then I suggest comparing it with the cycle of seasons. If you live where there are neither tides nor seasons, then you might be living in a data center!

life is beautiful on `localhost`

For a developer, the tide is high when facing a new project. Everything moves fast and everything goes well. We don't worry too much about external libraries added to the project, or the long-term operational costs.

And security is of course a detail.

when clients start using our service

The tide begins to recede as soon as we deploy this new service to production. Developers start to realize that the sea is shallower near the shores. The ship's hull gets scratched a bit when encountering the SRE team and the security team. A standardized and auditable deployment process is required. The sustainability and security of data must be ensured. SRE even demands the ability to easily rollback any new production deployment if an incident caused by a new release is detected.

scaling and the daily struggle to keep dependencies up to date

The memory of an ultra-fast system on localhost is long gone. Today, slowdowns are invading your system. Managing database indexes and profiling API calls become part of your routine. Cloud costs are rising faster than your revenue.

Not only that, but keeping your dependencies up to date becomes a race against time. As soon as you thought you were up to date with the latest version of kubernetes, a new minor version is released. Even worse, you're informed that the OS version used on your servers will no longer be supported in three months.

The tide hits bottom when an open source project beloved by developers ends up in the hands of a conglomerate that transforms it into a monthly subscription.

a matter of perspective

What is low tide for developers is high tide for others. When small boats get stuck in the mud on the seashore, we see people in tall boots venturing far out on the shore and picking up things that please them: shells, seaweed, and stranded fish. In the tech world, these are the company owners and shareholders celebrating your system becoming more widely used and bringing money to the organization.

It's a cycle we often endure without naming it. Yet recognizing it changes everything.

lessons

This tidal analogy is rich with lessons. First, our playground in technology is in perpetual motion. A few years ago, developers were in high demand and obtained comfortable salaries while telling themselves they could quit their job if circumstances ever began to displease them. Today developers are experiencing the fear, uncertainty, and doubt induced by the AI bubble; they stay in the same place longer, even if it means getting stuck in the mud of low tide.

It's a matter of perspective. A new IT project is exciting for developers, but stressful for an investor. A mature, successful IT product is exhilarating for the investor, but becomes a headache for developers.

Everything is changing. The main lesson is to stop thinking in absolute terms. The ideals of clean code, total freedom, and perpetual high tide are illusions. We must build while taking the tidal cycle into account: be less ambitious at high tide and less anxious at low tide. And the same goes for managers and executives: your teams' level of performance and productivity will fluctuate. At high tide, you'll be able to present powerful demos during your sprint reviews. But at low tide, when most of your developers' time is spent debugging intermittent problems and updating their libraries, your PowerPoint presentations might be less sexy!

actions

Your duty is to identify at what stage of the tide your industry currently sits and at what stage of the tide your team is currently operating. Knowing that your reality obeys a form of cycle, knowing where you currently stand has every chance of better informing your decisions today as well as your long-term strategy.

translated from french by Sonnet 4.5

AI Learning Path for DevOps - A Series

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

First part of a series on integrating artificial intelligence into DevOps practices

I believe the formalization of the DevOps engineer role (or DevOps specialist) really matured alongside the rise of cloud computing.

One of the key value propositions from public cloud providers was streamlining the traditional system administrator (sysadmin) role, along with related positions like network technicians. Commercial cloud platforms present themselves as pre-built resource blocks that are optimized out-of-the-box and often managed by the cloud provider under a defined SLA. The idea was that you'd just need to train developers or retrain willing system administrators to bridge the gap between programmers (dev) and operations (ops).

Generative artificial intelligence - AI that can generate text, code, and images - is disrupting this whole concept. The programmer's supremacy is being challenged; chunks of code can now be generated in seconds. Same goes for operations: mysterious problems can be debugged and resolved in a fraction of the time thanks to ChatGPT - it's proven.

Why are DevOps folks best positioned to become "AI natives"?

While DevOps isn't really a profession so much as a culture around tech products, I believe today's DevOps practitioners will be the first to become AI natives. Why?

First, because DevOps people generally have an opportunistic mindset. They love solving problems and are naturally inclined to set aside preconceptions to adopt simple, effective solutions like process automation and "everything-as-code."

Second, being a DevOps engineer is less about a job title and more about a state of mind. By pivoting toward AI, DevOps practitioners reinforce this mindset, which boils down to first-class pragmatism.

Most importantly, the main objective of DevOps is the software development lifecycle (SDLC). It's about taking ideas and transforming them into products and services that add value for customers. Everything else - infrastructure-as-code, automated pipelines, collaboration with developers - these aren't ends in themselves.

The primary goal is always to deliver quality products or services to people who are willing to pay to use them. And that won't change with AI.

How to pivot toward AI: a pragmatic approach

It's funny, but the idea of embracing artificial intelligence as a DevOps practitioner is still controversial. We love to mock AI suggestions when the real culprit isn't the tool but the person using it.

For me, pivoting toward AI doesn't mean blindly delegating all our tasks to ChatGPT. It means first accepting this tool by learning how to use it better.

Master the art of prompt engineering: Understanding how to optimize our questions to get better answers.
Develop critical judgment: Knowing when to use ChatGPT and when to take time to think and carefully read the documentation.

It's a bit like when you need to accomplish a task that takes 2 minutes once every 6 months: is a good DevOps engineer going to spend a week automating that task, or pass on it?

Technical foundations: where to start?

To learn how to better use AI, you need to start with the fundamentals.

Since we like to deliver value quickly, I suggest skipping a few chapters of AI history and jumping straight into today's hot topic:

Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Large Language Models (LLMs). These two concepts represent the foundation of revolutionary generative AI tools. Understanding how ChatGPT works will help us better exploit it while knowing how to manage its shortcomings.

Recommended learning resources

There's a ton of online resources for getting familiar with NLP and LLMs. From magazine articles to university courses, I'd like to choose free options that include hands-on work and some form of certification.

Hugging Face's Natural Language Processing Course (free) with exams

5 Learning Activities - Introduction to Generative AI Learn Path (managed by Google Cloud) with exercises on the Vertex AI Studio platform

Conclusion

I've proposed the idea that DevOps practitioners (or DevOps engineers) have professional traits that favor pivoting toward a world where artificial intelligence has a primary role in designing and delivering tech products and services.

As a call to action, I'm proposing to follow two introductory tracks offered by reputable AI organizations: HuggingFace and Google. Understanding the technology behind revolutionary tools like ChatGPT will immediately allow us to use them better and then continue our pivot by digging deeper.

It's still early, but I believe we'll then study the libraries and frameworks used by industry players (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, and scikit-learn), then explore data management aspects: data wrangling, ETL, and preprocessing with tools like Pandas, NumPy, and SQL. Then why not demonstrate our knowledge by diving into workflow automation for real use cases involving models and external APIs?

To be continued...

translated from french by Claude Sonnet 4

What the American Film Glengarry Glen Ross Teaches Us About Strategic Listening

Mon, 21 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Knowing how to listen and understand before acting is the key to avoiding missteps and progressing, whether in sales or in life.

The American film "Glengarry Glen Ross" (1992) by David Mamet presents New York real estate brokers from a somewhat shady firm where aggressive selling is an encouraged practice. It's another cult film like "Office Space" (1999) by Mike Judge where the working world is illustrated in a striking way. As much as it makes us laugh, it should also be a source of learning to help us move to the next level.

What matters at work are results

This film contains gems from a distant world where competition between colleagues is not only valued but erected as a system. Playing the role of a corporate motivator, Alec Baldwin's character says out loud to a poorly performing colleague who is pouring himself a cup of coffee:

"Coffee is for closers only!"

That is to say, the coffee paid for by the employer is a reward for those who produce results. That we must be clear: it's concrete results and not efforts and long hours spent at the office that are valued here.

Again, the same corporate motivator drops a bomb. The ABC of work is:

A: Always
B: be
C: closing

Here's another gem that makes me smile because it's so anti-socially correct. It's so raw and direct. While the working world often means hearing excuses and explanations to justify the absence of tangible results. Misery! Imagine this motivator unleashed in your workplace.

Listening to better achieve your objectives

Beyond the ruthless philosophy embodied by the main character Richard Roma played by Al Pacino lie nuggets of wisdom.

Roma is a shark and he's presented as such. Despite the violence of his words, I see him as an educator. He teaches a lesson to his colleagues: the savoir-être of a highly strategic person. What's not important isn't important. And what is important, is.

The nuance with which Al Pacino's character is portrayed is masterful. Having learned that a colleague signed an important contract, he stops and takes time to celebrate this victory in a sincere and attentive way. When another colleague tries to draw his attention to tortuous and fundamentally toxic aspects, he ignores him.

You want to learn the first rule? You'd know if you spent a day in your life. Don't ever open your mouth 'till you know what the shot is. You're a fucking child.

Richard Roma explodes at a colleague who just made him lose an important sale. Williamson spoke without knowing the context of his relationship with his client. He assumed he understood the situation and rushed to appease this client by giving him information that had the opposite effect. Instead of comforting him, his words only increased his torment.

And I'm the first guilty of talking too much without taking time to listen.

And that's the key to the kingdom: listening! Understanding the situation, understanding the context and listening to everything the other person has to say before speaking.

Not only is interrupting others impolite, but it's harmful to you. You lose your interlocutor's respect, you bring no value to the situation, and you prevent yourself from properly understanding the situation to achieve success.

Knowing how to listen and understand before acting is the key to avoiding missteps and progressing, whether in sales or in life.

translated from french by Claude Sonnet 4

Sources

Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)

the scene

"Know what the shot is"

Scattered Spider: How to Defend Against the New Breed of Cybercriminals

Sun, 13 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

“Nothing in the world is as soft and fluid as water. Yet for dissolving the hard and inflexible, nothing can surpass it.” — Tao Te Ching

Meet Scattered Spider—aka UNC3944, Scattered Swine, Octo Tempest, and Muddled Libra. This loose collective of young hackers from the UK, US, and Canada is rewriting the playbook for cybercrime. Law enforcement and recent arrests confirm: they’re young, native English speakers, and unlike most hacker crews, they’re spontaneous, agile, and always evolving their tactics.

MGM Resorts International and Caesars Entertainment are just two of the hundred-plus organizations hit by cyberattacks attributed to Scattered Spider. According to indictments released Wednesday, the accused targeted at least 12 US organizations, stole data, and made off with roughly $11 million in crypto from at least 29 individuals.

These aren’t random attacks. Scattered Spider picks its targets with surgical precision. Their main goal? Money. In 2023, they famously crippled Caesars and MGM casinos. Caesars paid a $15 million ransom; MGM refused.

Social engineering is psychological manipulation—tricking people into giving up access to systems or sensitive info.

Scattered Spider excels at social engineering. Fluent in English and tuned into local culture, these hackers are masters at impersonating employees and sweet-talking IT helpdesks into resetting passwords or bypassing multi-factor authentication (MFA).

Vishing is a social engineering technique where attackers use phone or video calls to trick victims into revealing sensitive information.

Some sources say Scattered Spider also uses vishing, posing as IT support. In the casino attacks, they bombarded employees with SMS threats about suspended access, pushing them to call the helpdesk—where the trap was set.

Social engineering gets all the headlines, but these hackers are also sharp strategists and skilled system admins. Their technical chops are real.

SIM-swapping is a hack where attackers transfer a victim’s phone number to a SIM card they control, intercepting calls, texts, and verification codes.

Scattered Spider’s approach is shaking up the status quo for frontline defenders. Security teams, once jaded by routine attacks, are now facing a new breed. Originally, the group used SIM-swapping to steal large sums of crypto. But they don’t stop at digital tricks—they’ve been known to physically attack phone stores to snatch supervisor tablets, making SIM-swapping even easier.

Today, they’re “big game hunters,” targeting tech giants (Okta, Twilio, Snowflake, LastPass), financial institutions (Visa, Transamerica, Truist Bank), and, most recently, the travel industry (Qantas).

[Australian airline] Qantas announced [early July 2025] that millions of customer accounts were exposed in a “major” cyberattack.

The airline hasn’t confirmed Scattered Spider was behind it, but experts say the attack has their fingerprints all over it.

Scattered Spider knows modern IT systems inside out—and the usual weak spots in big organizations.

Their entry point? IT staff with privileged access—senior sysadmins and execs. The helpdesk is a favorite target: it’s busy, often isolated, and vulnerable. They also exploit “MFA fatigue,” bombarding staff with authentication requests until someone lets their guard down and approves a login.

Unlike classic malware attacks, which rely on malicious files, Living Off the Land (LOTL) attacks are fileless—they use tools already present in the environment, like PowerShell, WMI, or Mimikatz.

By using native tools, these attacks are much harder to detect, especially for organizations relying on traditional security solutions focused on known files or scripts. This lets hackers stay invisible for weeks, months, even years.

Once inside, Scattered Spider gets creative. They can spoof login pages to steal credentials and use LOTL tactics—leveraging what’s already on the network.

A domain controller is a server that manages authentication and permissions for users and computers in a centralized network.

Their exploitation methods are impressive. Security experts have noted their interest in Single Sign-On (SSO) services. By cloning a victim’s Okta service on a “free trial” account, they maintain persistence and dodge detection. Similarly, they’ve been known to set up their own domain controllers, granting themselves the permissions they need.

Their technical skills are amplified by agility. Their philosophy? Amoral. Motivated by profit, they show little concern for collateral damage. These young hackers form virtual communities on Telegram, sharing knowledge and refining techniques. Their punch comes from meticulous prep and ruthless inventiveness. The cultural similarity between attackers and victims is also raising eyebrows.

A threat profile is a detailed description of potential threats an organization might face, including their capabilities, motivations, and potential impact. It helps organizations prioritize security measures by understanding who might attack, how, and what assets are at risk. Threat profiles are essential for proactive cybersecurity—they help anticipate and mitigate potential attacks.

Is defending against Scattered Spider futile? Not quite—but recent incidents leave no choice for organizations that qualify as “big game.” I’m no security expert, but step one is building a threat profile. This lets you list and qualify the risks your company faces.

MDR (Managed Detection and Response) is a managed security service where experts continuously monitor systems to detect and respond to threats.

XDR (Extended Detection and Response) aggregates and analyzes data from multiple sources (email, computers, servers, etc.) for better, coordinated attack detection and response.

Some practices need to go, replaced by stronger measures:

Stop using SMS for MFA tokens.
Prevent users from ever seeing or sharing their MFA codes:
- Use Microsoft’s Windows Hello for Business.
- Use FIDO hardware keys (Yubikeys).
Require unique passwords and use a password manager.
Use certificate-based authentication (e.g., Microsoft Intune).
Invest in helpdesk training—teach best practices for authenticating callers.
Train all employees—if someone claims to be IT, can you verify their identity?
Use brand protection services—get alerts when someone registers domains similar to yours.
Plant “honey tokens” on your web pages to detect asset cloning attempts.
Use darknet monitoring services.
Invest in security fundamentals:
- Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
- Extended Detection and Response (XDR)
Have a solid backup strategy and a proven disaster recovery plan.

translated from french by GPT-4.1

Sources

Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman (2025-07-02), Wired - A Group of Young Cybercriminals Poses the ‘Most Imminent Threat’ of Cyberattacks Right Now

What is Brand Protection Software?

Scattered Spider: British-American hacker group

5 defendants linked to ‘Scattered Spider’ hacker group behind 2023 MGM, Caesars cyberattacks

Scattered Spider Targets Tech Companies for Help-Desk Exploitation

Shaking up the Ransomware Game: Introducing Scattered Spider

What we know about Scattered Spider, the hacker group targeting airlines

Following: When Kant Invites Himself into a Christopher Nolan Noir

Sat, 14 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Spoiler alert!

Released in 1998, "Following" is the first feature film by English director Christopher Nolan. It’s a low-budget neo-noir film. Nolan later explained in interviews that he chose the film noir genre, black and white, and little-known actors to appeal to an audience not used to low-budget films.

The viewer feels as if the film is speaking to them personally. Film noir has the particularity of making the plot and themes immediately engaging for the audience. The genre allows us to project our own lives and fears onto the big screen.

Being accused and found guilty of a crime you didn’t commit is certainly a familiar fear. And for Bill, the main character, it’s a nightmare come true after the bad decision to follow strangers in the street to satisfy his curiosity and questionable artistic sense.

"Following" is the story of Bill, an idle and curious writer. His misadventure begins with his decision to follow strangers in the street to experience strong emotions and satisfy an artistic curiosity. In Kantian terms: using others as a means to satisfy personal interests without their consent.

Caught at his own game, Cobb, a seasoned manipulator, notices what’s going on and confronts Bill. Cobb impresses with his composure and apparent transparency. He immediately seems to trust Bill, letting him look at what he’s carrying in his sports bag.

For his part, Bill stubbornly tries to justify his immoral hobby. In bad faith, he proudly shares the rules he’s set for himself to frame his amateur spying activity—rules he doesn’t actually follow.

Cobb quickly introduces him to a higher level of manipulation. Barely ten minutes into the film, we see them breaking into strangers’ homes and rearranging their personal belongings more for fun than for profit. Whether for artistic interest or the pleasure of meddling in strangers’ private lives, the two clearly use their victims as mere objects to play with.

Beyond his violations of Kantian morality, Bill displays one of the worst flaws detested by the ancient Greeks: impudence and presumption. He convinces himself he can break free from his mentor and claim the full powers of a new career as an artistic burglar. He has the audacity to separate from Cobb, believing he has mastered the art. Even after taking a beating from Cobb, Bill lacks the wisdom to realize his mistake.

I don’t believe "Following" draws its roots from ancient Greece. But it does feature the common theme of a mortal trying to fly too close to the sun and being thoroughly destroyed by circumstances.

Likewise, I don’t think Christopher Nolan’s work is consciously meant as an illustration of Kantian morality.

From the start, by giving himself the right to follow strangers in the street, the main character commits an infraction against Kant’s categorical imperative, which commands us never to reduce others to a means for our own ends. For Bill, following strangers is exciting and has an artistic appeal for him.

His encounter with Cobb accelerates the violation of Kantian morality. They give themselves the right to violate strangers’ privacy and impact their lives in unexpected ways. Cobb teaches him various psychological manipulation techniques—how to use others’ weaknesses to achieve his own goals.

These discoveries excite the main character, and the gravity of his criminal experiences quickly intensifies.

The punishment inflicted on the main character is Kantian retribution rather than divine justice.

Kantian morality is rational. The idea of forbidding ourselves from treating others as a means to our own ends rather than as people worthy in themselves comes from reason. Reason determines that a world where everyone treats others as things to exploit would make justice and social life impossible.

Through his decisions and actions, the main character has symbolically destroyed the foundation that makes it possible to trust others and be treated fairly. By treating others as tools, he opened the door to being used himself as the scapegoat for a murder he didn’t commit. He becomes a pawn in the game of someone more skillful than himself.

The Kantian moral themes present in Christopher Nolan’s "Following" are:

autonomy: Gradually, the main character denies others’ autonomy by following them in the street and then breaking into their homes.
moral blindness: The main character claims his intentions are noble. He wants to understand others and improve his art. However, intentions cannot excuse moral infractions.
illusion of control: Bill believes he’s in control and sees himself as a kind of superhuman who can change others’ lives, when in fact he’s the one being manipulated.

The greatness of "Following" is that the main character’s impudence is punished by the same kind of infraction he himself committed. The rational moral order defended by Kant imposes itself. By straying from the limits of rational morality, the main character becomes vulnerable to the same kind of dehumanization he practiced on others—taken to the extreme.

translated from french by GPT-4.1 following prompt: "can you translate this blog post in english? keep the same tone"

Action, to be effective, must be both slow and swift

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Exploring the reign of Persian king Cambyses II, particularly in the context of Darius' rise, offers insights into the potential dangers of absolute power concentrated in the hands of a single individual—and the profound consequences it had for those around him.

His brief reign, from 530 to 522 BCE, is often seen as an example of the excesses of power exercised without oversight or accountability. Son of Cyrus II, Cambyses II conquered Egypt in 525 BCE, founding the 27th dynasty. This conquest was marked by extreme brutality. Offended by the resistance of King Psammenitus, Cambyses II had his children humiliated and massacred, forcing them to march dressed as slaves with nooses around their necks. He also desecrated Egyptian tombs as an act of revenge.

But his ambition didn’t stop there. He launched three failed military expeditions against his neighbors. The first was abandoned when his Phoenician fleet refused to attack Carthage. The second ended in tragedy: attempting to conquer Ethiopia, Cambyses sent an army without preparation or supplies, forcing his soldiers to resort to cannibalism as reported by Herodotus. Finally, an army sent to attack the sanctuary of Ammon vanished in the desert, reportedly engulfed by a sandstorm, according to the Ammonians.

The end of Cambyses II’s reign is often described as being marked by erratic behavior and alleged madness. Amused by blaspheming local religious beliefs, he allegedly fatally wounded the Apis bull, a sacred Egyptian deity, and ordered the assassination of both his brother and sister.

The Greek historian Herodotus presents the conspiracy of the Seven, in which seven Persian nobles, including Darius, slaughtered the usurpers of the Persian throne which is presented as a founding moment that sparked political reflection. It is worth noting that shortly before his death, Cambyses II fell victim to a scheme orchestrated by one of his trusted men: following his brother's discreet assassination, since the population was unaware of his death, he replaced him with his own brother. Thus, this non-Persian individual became king after Cambyses II’s death and ruled as a usurper for several years.

After years of chaos and misfortune, the Persian nobility appears to have reflected on the best political system to restore Persian imperial power. They all agreed never again to submit to the rule of a single man who could act as he pleased without being held accountable. In any case, pride, the pursuit of personal gain, and reckless haste are flaws inherent in such a political situation.

Herodotus’s account of the 'conspiracy of the Seven' can be seen as highlighting a rare but valuable idea: that of decisive and discreet action. Unlike Cambyses II, portrayed as a madman driven by impulse, the six original conspirators acted with caution and discretion. Darius, the seventh, took the leadership role, convinced it would be dangerous to wait any longer—and even riskier to include more participants in the plot. He firmly believed that even acting as a group might feel reassuring but ultimately increases risks: the wider the circle, the more fragile the secrecy.

Action, to be effective, must be both slow and swift.

The Power of Prudent Uncertainty

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Before interrupting someone or diving into an argumentative debate, it’s essential to pause and suspend our judgment. This article explores why this approach, far from being just an intellectual exercise, is actually the key to profound wisdom.

Judgment is that mental act where we declare something to be true. It can take the form of factual judgments, like “It’s been raining since this morning,” or opinions, such as “Today is such a gloomy day.” It can also include moral, administrative, aesthetic, or even practical judgments.

In all these cases, the human mind engages in a decisive evaluation between two elements. For instance, administrative judgments stem from decisions based on laws and regulations, while aesthetic judgments evaluate a work of art based on specific criteria.

While relativism encourages us to accept every judgment as a subjective opinion—allowing everyone to express themselves without fear of repercussions—it also presents a trap: any sincere pursuit of truth, wisdom, or exact knowledge risks being reduced to the same level as the ramblings of an unbalanced mind.

In reality, every judgment carries a claim to truth. It cuts, imposes a conclusion, and closes a debate.

But before judgment is passed, everything remains open. In the legal field, this openness takes the form of investigations, pleadings, and deliberations. In science, it’s about observing, analyzing, and interpreting.

Adopting this methodical yet cautious approach means acknowledging that truth exists and is worth the effort to uncover.

What if, for just a moment, we put ourselves in the philosopher’s shoes? Truth would become our sole objective. We’d feel a certain disdain for trivial debates, for those discussions where everyone tries to impose their judgment, to assert their opinion on everything and nothing. Instead of scattering our judgments to the wind, we’d choose to cultivate a prudent uncertainty, to suspend our judgment, and to dedicate ourselves to deeper reflection.

In truth, meditation and reflection are rewards in themselves. A mind that exhausts itself in constant judgment grows tired and diluted, while the philosopher’s mind—open and serene—finds in wonder a far more precious balance.

Far from political turmoil and narcissistic speeches, we turn off our screens, embrace voluntary simplicity, practice meditation, listen more, and speak less. This return to philosophy, as an art of living, resonates in our quest for meaning.

By suspending judgment, we give ourselves the chance to reap the fruits of wisdom.

translated from french by chatgpt4

The Question from Elon Musk That Annoys: What Did You Do Last Week?

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

"Elon Musk threatens FBI agents and air traffic controllers with forced resignation if they do not respond to an email."

Employees and the media are outraged.

There is something interesting about the exercise he proposes. He asks his employees to summarize their work from the previous week in five key points and then send this report, copying their supervisor.

For my part, I find the exercise relevant. In fact, I have been doing something similar for several years: every month, I fill out a sheet where I note my achievements, their impact, and the lessons I have learned. This exercise helps me take a step back from my work and skills. In the face of unexpected events, distractions, and constant changes, having an overview is enlightening.

But what is the real intent behind Elon Musk’s request to U.S. government employees?

The Legendary Inefficiency of Large Organizations

Obviously, Musk seeks to demonstrate that many government employees have a limited impact on their organizations. The daily life of a white-collar worker is well-known and often mocked, whether in movies like Office Space or on YouTube: endless meetings, trivial email exchanges, internal political struggles… Everything except value-creating work.

His approach is brutal and intrusive, directly threatening the jobs of thousands of people. But if we set aside this threat, the exercise itself could reveal an unsettling truth: in many organizations, the structure of work itself prevents employees from truly working.

Large companies and administrations are often inefficient, not by accident, but by design. Some cynics even claim that their main goal is to preserve their own structure, rather than delivering value to their clients or citizens.

Liberating Individual Contributors

How can we allow employees to escape organizational blockages?

Unfortunately, it would require getting rid of those who benefit from the status quo. Many executives started their careers with the desire to change the world, only to resign themselves to doing the bare minimum to keep their jobs. Some have mastered the rules of the game so well that they’ve climbed the ranks, becoming the guardians of an inefficient system.

Therefore, eliminating the hierarchy becomes a sine qua non condition for achieving true organizational efficiency. But resistance is strong: those who benefit most from these dysfunctions are the executives and senior management, never the individual contributors.

Self-Organization: An Effective Alternative

Tech companies have proven that it is possible to achieve goals without a heavy hierarchy. Before being co-opted by large corporations, the Agile philosophy promoted simple and effective principles for designing software.

A striking example is Valve, the video game publisher. In this company, there is no formal hierarchy. Employees are free to choose the projects they want to work on and who they want to collaborate with. Better yet, they are encouraged to launch their own initiatives!

"A self-organized team has the autonomy to decide, as a group, how its members will work together, who is responsible for decisions, and the concrete steps to achieve its goals."

Another similar approach is "Mission Command". Originating in the military, this philosophy is based on the idea that subordinates must receive clear objectives but have considerable autonomy in achieving them.

"The ability to assign tasks to subordinates with minimal explicit instructions is a key element of 'Mission Command', adopted by several Western armies. This approach allows great flexibility in dynamic situations, exploiting opportunities through the creativity of subordinates and their understanding of the immediate situation, without requiring new orders."

Challenging rigid hierarchies and ineffective bureaucracy may be what most bothers people about Elon Musk’s approach.

When a Question Becomes a Problem

If the simple question "What did you do last week?" causes so much discomfort, it is probably a sign of an environment riddled with inefficiency.

In fact, rather than targeting government employees, Musk could simply ask the same question to the directors of government agencies. That would be enough:

"Dear directors, what did you do last week?

List five key points and send a copy to all your employees."

Sources

Ensuring Security: Investigating Changes in ODROID LinuxFactory Package Origins

Sun, 26 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Every week-end or so, I like to update my linux servers to keep them patched and secure. They are ARM64 single-board computers manufactured by Korean hardware manufacturer ODROID. I use them for a variety of use-cases such as media server, NAS, and sandbox environments for personal projects. Even though I am the only user of this system, I need it to be secure.

As most GNU/Linux user, I'm guilty of mostly blindly trusting the OS' built-in package manager. It is however a crucial aspect to take into consideration to keep a system safe. Since commands like apt upgrade or apk add are executed as root, we must pay extra attention when we are issuing these commands.

Relying on a package manager to install and manage our dependencies is a great way to stay safe. We basically delegate to package maintainers the responsibility to accept or refuse to distribute packages. Using a package manager is already a step-above, security-wise, manually installing packages downloaded from the Internet

Package management is assured by knowledgeable and reliable people. They are expert in managing packages dependencies to avoid conflicts or problems.

During last upgrade, I ran across an unusual message such as

E: The repository " http://ppa.linuxfactory.or.kr/ bookworm InRelease " has changed its " Origin " value from " Dongjin Kim <tobetter(at)gmail.com> " to " LinuxFactory ".

N: This must be fully accepted before updates from this repository can be applied. Please refer to the manual pages " apt-secure(8) " for more details.

My first thought was that maybe a malicious actor tried to take control of the upstream I use to keep my Odroid machines up-to-date. That was the appropriate level of paranoia to display in order to stay safe. I cancelled my upgrade plans until I could be confident this change in APT upstream was legitimate.

validate APT trusted keys

The first thing I did was to validate that the cryptographic signature chain used by APT to verify the upstream repository's authenticity was intact. Executing command apt-key list will list currently trusted keys by the APT package management system. Or better, since apt-key is deprecated: checking keys in /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/ is also useful. The key used by the maintainer listed as "Origin" hadn't change.

Knowing that the maintainers were still using the same key was a relief. The change in "Origin" was concerning since it could yield a potential risk of the repository being compromised or hijacked.

search public information about the change or contact the package maintainer

To conclude my investigations, I browsed the manufacturer's public forum ODROID by Hardkernel for news about this change.

Since it was not mentionned, I emailed the maintainer who kindly confirmed he was the origin of the change and that I could trust the change. Which I doubly appreciate since it is right now a long holidays in asian countries for the Lunar New Year 2025 (Wednesday January 29th 2025).

Dear <my name>,

The repository had been update a couple of days ago by me and I can confirm the
the server is not hacked at all, just change the repository name to LinuxFactory
which is my domain.

Best regards,
Dongjin Kim.

sources of information

How to Verify and Secure Apt Package Authentication

Suspicious APT Package Manager Execution

Is the Linux / Debian software and package-management ecosystem secure?

What is similar to the Tao is destined for success.

Thu, 09 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

"The Taoist tradition is one of the three pillars, along with Confucianism and Buddhism, of Chinese thought. This philosophy appeals to our Western minds partly because it is not colored by traumatic episodes from our childhood and also because of its intrinsic flexibility: it readily lends itself to interpretations that align with our personal opinions."

"To govern a great kingdom, one must imitate someone cooking a small fish."

The eminent master refrains from words

And when his work is accomplished and his task fulfilled,

the people say: "This comes from myself"

In philosophy, addressing politics as the relationship of power between human beings was a way to convey practical wisdom while integrating it into an explanation of the world that could satisfy our quest for meaning.

The Book of the Principle and Its Action, by the founder of Taoism, challenges our intellectual reflexes based on common sense and habitual beliefs. The Tao is the nature of everything: it is empty, silent, and boundless. 'The Tao, when accumulated, becomes effective.' In short, everything that acts like the Tao is destined for success, while that which strays from it moves toward failure.

The ultimate principle of the Tao is non-action. Thus, it is said that a ruler who governs a state discreetly, without forcing the people and without multiplying decrees and laws, is destined for success. Conversely, one who is restless and agitated is heading toward ruin.

The same applies to anyone who seeks to lead others to achieve their goals. By adopting Taoist principles, their work will be crowned with success. Moreover, all those who supported them will eventually believe that their actions and decisions came from themselves (and not from the master).

translated by ChatGPT

sources

Lao-Tseu, Tao-tö king, LX
Jean Levi, "Han-Fei-tse ou le Tao du Prince", chapitre "Commentaire de Lao tse"

2024 Reading List

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

My Book of the Year - Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, narrated by Ray Porter

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, narrated by Ray Porter in its English audiobook version, is a science fiction novel that might appeal even to those, like me, who aren’t particularly fond of the genre.

The story is remarkably well-constructed, with a narrative about an improbable and unprecedented friendship.

It’s actually the most recommended audiobook on Reddit, and rightfully so.

Ryland Grace is the sole survivor of a desperate mission, a last-ditch effort. If he fails, humanity and Earth itself will perish.

Except right now, he doesn't know that. He doesn't even remember his own name, let alone the nature of his mission or how to complete it.

All he knows is that he’s been asleep for a very, very long time. And he’s just woken up to discover he's millions of miles from home, with only two dead bodies for company.

Dan Davies, The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions

I read this book by English economist Daniel Davies on the recommendation of a friend I met online.

At first glance, I was expecting a scathing critique of the big corporations on which our lives depend. I was ready for my disillusionment with these giants to be reignited.

Instead, it was a fascinating introduction to economic and political cybernetics, a powerful framework for understanding power dynamics within modern organizations.

Cybernetics

[...]Control theory as it is applied to complex systems. Cybernetics is associated with models in which a monitor compares what is happening to a system at various sampling times with some standard of what should be happening, and a controller adjusts the system’s behaviour accordingly.

The term cybernetics comes from the ancient Greek word kybernetikos (“good at steering”), referring to the art of the helmsman.

Source: "cybernetics" - Britannica

Chris Dixon, Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet

This book addresses a major issue that Web 3.0 technologies aim to solve: ensuring ownership without relying on central authorities

Distributed systems based on blockchain are often ridiculed due to financial bubbles or fraud in the sector. Yet, behind this smoke screen are legitimate use cases, where these technologies play a crucial role.

I recommend this book to any technologist looking to contribute to "the next big tech innovation."

Vijay Boyapati, The Bullish Case for Bitcoin

Probably the best explanation of Bitcoin and why you should care about it or steer clear of it.

Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Road: The Asia and the Remaking of the World Order

As a Westerner, this book opened my eyes to what’s happening in the rest of the world economically.

Gérard Chauvy, L'Abwehr: 1939-1945 le Service Secret en France

Working with spies is like playing tennis without seeing your opponent, while never being sure if you’re really being served a tennis ball

The Abwehr was the Nazi Germany’s military intelligence service, responsible for espionage and counter-espionage, active from 1920 to 1945.

How do foreign intelligence services operate? Not at all like in a James Bond's movie.

This well-documented book explores the profiles of individuals working for foreign intelligence services, how their operations are funded, and the extent of the damage they cause to the societies they infiltrate.

Joseph Cox, Dark Wire

A great read for tech enthusiasts with a taste for the illegal.

In 2018, a powerful secure communication app called Anom took root among organized criminals. They thought Anom allowed them to do business in the shadows. Except one thing: it was secretly run by the FBI.

The covert access to Anom and a series of related investigations allowed U.S., Australian, and European authorities to closely observe the world of criminals. Smugglers, money launderers, hitmen, a sprawling global economy... But as the FBI began to lose control of Anom, did the agency go too far?

Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa

I started reading this more for the author, Haruki Murakami, than for the subject: internationally renowned conductor Seiji Ozawa.

The book is a series of captivating interviews where we discover the complex role of a conductor. I was fascinated by the personalities and flaws of some maestros, who remain deeply human despite their exceptional talent.

Carlos Castaneda, The Devil's Grass and the Little Smoke

A rereading of a fantastic tale that had deeply captivated me during my adolescence. A mystical and fascinating journey into the depths of perception and reality.

Dany Laferrière, A Certain Art of Living

A booklet of poetry by our immortal Quebecois

Truly unpretentious, the ideas are expressed with disarming simplicity. These poems create an intimate connection between the reader and the author, a silent but deep dialogue.

Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

Another rereading that’s worth coming back to.

It’s common to hear that Crime and Punishment, like other 19th-century doorstop novels, is an intimidating read, even unapproachable. Nothing could be further from the truth, in my experience:

The story is fascinating, especially the complex psychology of the characters.
The novel is divided into short chapters (10 to 20 pages), perfect for a daily reading session of about an hour.
Finally, immersion in this narrative is far more rewarding than binge-watching videos on the internet.

Scott Paterson, Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis

A book I don’t remember reading in detail... A reread is definitely in order for 2025.

A seasoned Wall Street Journal journalist explores the world of billionaire traders and high-risk crisis forecasters trying to turn extreme events into financial opportunities.

There’s no doubt our world has become more extreme. Pandemics, climate change, superpower rivalries, technological disruptions, political radicalization, religious fundamentalism: all threats creating chaos that puts trillions of dollars in assets at risk. But around the world, in a variety of disciplines, super-forecasters are trying to eliminate uncertainty in what was once thought of as pure randomness. Some place their faith in “black swans” – unpredictable and catastrophic events that can’t be anticipated but send exotic financial instruments into extremely profitable directions. The most famous of this group of high-stakes traders are the ones managing the Universa fund, who, during extreme upheaval days, have made up to a billion dollars.

Author Scott Patterson gained exclusive access to Universa’s strategists and met with sharp-minded visionaries in various fields, from earthquake prediction to counterterrorism to climatology, to see if it’s really possible to bet on catastrophes – and win. Captivating, relevant, and revealing, this book is a must-read for anyone questioning how some investors today turn disasters into profits.

Seth Rogen, Yearbook

A hilarious book! Best enjoyed in audiobook form, read by Seth Rogen himself, who adds an inimitable touch to his stories.

His stoner laughter is priceless

Patrick Bringley, All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me

A fascinating stay in the life stories of a museum guard in New York City. A unique perspective on art and everyday life in an iconic place.

Eliyahu M. Goldratt, The Goal

For fans of the novel The Phoenix Project, this book is a must-read!

In The Goal, you'll discover the counter-intuitive truths of the Theory of Constraints, an essential lesson for improving any workflow, whether in technology or elsewhere.

Tom Segura, I'd Like to Play Alone, Please: Essays

Another hilarious read! A must-listen audiobook read by Tom Segura himself, to fully enjoy his sharp humor.

Christopher Hadnagy, Social Engineering, 2nd Edition

A practical guide for becoming a social engineering security professional

This book taught me a lot about vulnerabilities to psychological manipulation attempts

Becoming aware of your weaknesses is always a step in the right direction

Olivier Boisvert-Magnen, Jean Leloup: Moments of Lucidity

I thought I knew everything about Jean Leloup... but not at all!

This book is full of fascinating and touching stories about this unique artist, as well as the talented musicians who have accompanied him since the 1980s.

"As Hubert Lenoir so aptly puts it in his preface: Jean Leloup is a superhero. He appears and disappears, no one knows where he is or what he will do today, or tomorrow. He speaks his own accent, because he comes from his own country, his own planet. A unique figure in the history of Quebec’s music, it was high time a book worthy of him was written. Moments of Lucidity is an exploration of Leloup’s discography, the most influential and irreverent of our singer-songwriters over the last four decades." (summary)

Michel Tremblay, Dear Chekhov

End the year on a high note with a play by our national playwright.

This text illustrates the rivalries of a family of actors during a family meal.

translated from french by Chatgpt

Zoomers are talking: can you understand them?

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

(updated with new words: garbo)

Youth always had its own private language. In my younger days, I remember moving to a new city and discovering kids my age used an array of unknown expressions to me. Quick! Better learn them fast. A common language defines a community and offers a feeling of belonging. Nowadays the community is global and youth shares thru Internet a common idiom older folks don't understand.

And they couldn't care less.

"Is it because the witness expresses himself so badly? There is another explanation. It's not because, uneasy, he poorly expresses himself that you don't understand him; it is because you won't understand him that he expresses himself so poorly." -- Elie Wiesel, foreword to "Night"(1960)

boujee: english rendition of the french word "bourgeois". It refers to someone or something that is high-class, luxury, or materialistic.
brekkie/din din: familiar words referring to meals; meaning "breakfast" and "dinner". "brekkie" is an australian slang term that has spread worldwide. "Din din" is a familiar word used between friends or family to refer to the evening meal.
bussin': adjective used to describe something that is perceived as extraordinary good. Usually talking about food.
cap: a cap is a lie. When someone wants to emphasize they are serious and they are telling the truth, they will often say: "No cap".
dank: used in the context of memes. Adjective used to describe a good meme; especially a terrible meme that is so terrible it is good. Prevalent on imageboards like Reddit and 4chan.
fam: an affectionate way to refer to a friend. Can be used instead of "bro" or "sis".
garbo: something is judged totally bad; short way to say "garbage": "This car is totally trash. It's garbo"
poggers: "poggers refers to a specific emoticon available on Twitch which depicts a surprised-looking Pepe the Frog. The word “poggers” is used to express excitement during a game when something exciting occurs." You can use this word instead of based.
yeet: "Yeet is an exclamation of excitement, approval, surprise, or all-around energy, often as issued when doing a dance move or throwing something."
zoomer: "Refers to members of Generation Z and is a play on the term "Boomer," which refers to members of the Baby Boomer generation. The term Zoomer is also in reference to the fast-paced upbringings members of Generation Z are characterized to have due to the fast advances in technology and culture that has been happening around them as a result of the interconnectivity of the American and Global populations because of the ubiquity of internet-connected smart phones and social media."
boomer: "a boomer is anyone who's older than you and is either complaining about younger generation, saying he hates his wife, or just believes in outdated beliefs about any subject. It can also be someone who doesn't know modern slang very well, or uses it in a "non-cool" way (not in a way that zoomer would use it) [A person] who wants things to go back to the way they were."
chad: "The term originated in Chicago and originally referred in a derogatory way to call a young urban American man, typically single and in his twenties or early thirties. The term was later appropriated in incel forums to refer to sexually active "alpha males". Within the manosphere, Chads are viewed as constituting the top decile in terms of genetic fitness. In online animation drawings in the manosphere, a Chad is further tagged with the last name Thundercock and is often depicted as muscular with a very pronounced crotch bulge. One such depiction, in the 'Virgin vs. Chad' internet meme of the late 2010s, displayed the head of Chad in the same shape as the borders of the country of the same name.
based: "Agreeable. Admirable. Worthy of support. Often used in contexts where the action or opinion ignores popular trends and social conventions or requires special effort. Used either seriously or tongue-in-cheek to encourage eccentric behavior for comedic effect."
cringe: "When someone acts/ or is so embarrassing or awkward , it makes you feel extemely ashamed and/or embarrassed."
manlet: "The term some males who feel inferior to another shorter male use. Typically the "manlet," would have a very attractive girlfriend/wife , will have a better physique, more money etc. and be more attractive over all. The taller male will then look for any flaws in there POV to hilight in the other male to raise there own self esteem."
incel: "aka "involuntarily celibate", a person (usually male) who has a horrible personality and treats women like sexual objects and thinks his lack of a sex life comes from being "ugly" when its really just his blatant sexism and terrible attitude. incels have little to no self awareness; even when they see other "ugly" men with girlfriends, they consider these men to be tricksters who have somehow beat the system and can get women despite being cursed with unattractiveness (in other words, theyre respectful to women and women are attracted to their personalities, but incels cant comprehend such a phenomenon). they believe that women owe them sex, and many of the more extreme incels like to spend time in incel communities on the internet coming up with ways to make women have sex with them (often involving genocide of people of color, genocide of "Chads" (men who have sex), taking rights away from women, raping them, having sex with women's dead bodies, and other horrid, disgusting things. they cant understand that that is PRECISELY why women want nothing to do with them)."
IT'S OGRE (it's over): an expression of hopelessness among incels. Usually about a negative characteristic judged to be responsible for their lack of success in love.

obviously, this expression is very niche. I heard it a couple of times online without being able to understand what it meant. Even asking younger people, it was hard to extract a definition from them; a definition richer than saying "it's over".
simp: "Someone who does way too much for a person they like. Someone who will say anything to please someone, particularly a girl, in the hopes that they will be in good favor with that person."
red-pilled: "A reference to the matrix used in politics. "You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes." Usually means that a Liberal has become more right winged."
rizz: Short for "charisma". Refers to someone's attractiveness; their seduction skills.
doge: "A very popular meme of a Shiba Inu dog with a strange look on his face. It went viral all over the internet. Now Doge is a dog meme. Most pictures of Doge are accompanied by words, usually the following: so, very, wow, much, such, and many."
cope: "A cope or coping mechanism, is a psychological strategy whereby someone rejects a harsh truth, and adopts a less disturbing belief instead. It is a term often used my looksmaxing incels to indicate that a given strategy is invalid or ineffective."
shu shu: Another way to say "shit" or "shitty" without being impolite. When something is bad, one can say it is "shu shu". Example: "This movie was shu shu"
smol: affectionate way to say something is "small". Implies that thing is also very cute.
sus: short for "suspicious" and "suspect". Became popular by people playing online video game "Among us" during the Covid pandemic.
amogus: In a meme congtext: a clever way to say "sus". Obviously refers to online video game "Among us".
tea(spilling/sipping): refers to gossips and gossiping. While "spilling the tea" means to talk behind someone's back. "Sipping tea" means to listen to gossips without actively participating into spreading rumors.

*bonus : baste is a portmanteau word; a mix of 'based' and 'namaste'.

Most definitions were 'top definition' from _Urban Dictionary_

sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_(slang)

https://www.urbandictionary.com/

https://parade.com/1293898/marynliles/gen-z-slang-words/

https://incels.wiki/w/It%27s_over

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Generation_Z_slang

Bloomberg Terminal: the Ultimate Software-as-a-Service

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

In technology, one can either innovate or imitate others.

Bloomberg Terminal: tens of thousands of dollars per month per user

This "software as a service" (SaaS) enjoys undeniable success despite the fact that it is neither "user friendly" nor highly polished. Above all, it does not promise a superior user experience (UX) despite its sky-high price.

Sold at a high price since the early 1980s, the Bloomberg Terminal is a resounding commercial success.

I believe that every technologist should familiarize themselves with this product in order to acquire a more accurate vision of the ingredients necessary for a tech product commercial success.

Bloomberg terminals are one of the main product offerings from Bloomberg L.P. They are one of the most heavily used and highly regarded professional investment systems to be created for the financial marketplace. Institutional investors are the typical customers of this product since the relatively high ongoing cost makes it unfeasible for individual investors with relatively small amounts of capital to purchase.

The system provides news, price quotes, and messaging across its proprietary secure network. It is well-known among the financial community for its black interface, which is not optimized for user experience but has become a recognizable trait of the service. It's not uncommon to see Bloomberg's rather bland visuals carried into their television station, although they round their media empire out with visually rich content in their flagship magazine Bloomberg Businessweek. .

Investopedia, "What Is a Bloomberg Terminal? Functions, Costs, and Alternatives", https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bloomberg_terminal.asp

value in tech

From an economic point of view, the ultimate objective of the technologist is to create value for the customer for whom a product or service is intended.

The subjective theory of value is an economic theory which proposes the idea that the value of any good is not determined by the utility value of the object, nor by the cumulative value of components or labour needed to produce or manufacture it, but instead is determined by the individuals or entities who are buying or selling the object in question. This trend is often seen in collectable items such as cars, vinyl records, and comic books. The value of an object may have increased substantially since its creation or original purchase due to age, a personal affinity, or scarcity.

Wikipedia, "Subjective theory of value", https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Subjective_theory_of_value

In crude terms, we say that value is what makes the user willing to pay to use a service or product.

SaaS - Software as a Service

The "on demand" software model combines the interests of software developers and their end-users.

A customer agrees to pay for their software as long as it brings them value. Otherwise the deal is off.

The "SaaS" model associated with cloud computing democratizes the market for ambitious solo developers. More and more small teams of developers, even solo developers, go a part of the business, and market products of high quality.

Cloud computing and SaaS model democratize access to tech market.

how can Bloomberg inspire ambitious developers?

I believe that the notion of value is at the heart of the lesson we must draw from success of the Bloomberg terminal.

Michael Bloomberg started the project following his dismissal from his employer. Armed with a solid knowledge of the financial sector, he invested his savings in the development of softwared catering to the financial world.

In 1981, Michael Bloomberg was fired from Salomon Brothers. He was given no severance package, but owned $10 million worth of equity as a partner at the firm. Using this money, Bloomberg, having designed in-house computerized financial systems for Salomon, set up a data services company named Innovative Market Systems (IMS) based on his belief that Wall Street would pay a premium for high-quality business information, delivered instantaneously on computer terminals in a variety of usable formats. The company sold customized computer terminals that delivered real-time market data, financial calculations and other analytics to Wall Street firms. At first, the machine was called the Market Master terminal, but later became known as the Bloomberg Terminal or simply "The Bloomberg". The terminal was released to market in December 1982. Merrill Lynch became the company's first customer, purchasing a 30% stake in IMS for $30 million in exchange for a five-year restriction on marketing the terminals to Merrill Lynch's competitors. In 1984, Merrill Lynch released IMS from the restriction.

Wikipedia, "Bloomberg Terminal", https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bloomberg_Terminal

conclusion

By way of conclusion, I will absolutely not be original. I repeat here what any pragmatic technologist already know.

The moral of the Bloomberg Terminal's success is that business domain knowledge is crucial for the success of any technology project.

Technical skills are less and less crucial to the success of a technology project.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel. Most computer problems have already been resolved. There are countless reusable code libraries that one can leverage. Architectural patterns that hold water are taught to budding system architects. Cloud providers offer turnkey development platforms allowing us to deploy a new project in production in a short time.

In technology, one can either innovate or imitate others.

No one has ever been fired for imitating others.

translation from french by google translate

sources

Understanding the Bloomberg Terminal: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0FGZvgf8kf8
Bloomberg: The Financial Search Engine : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyOcrzFsb00
How Does The Bloomberg Terminal Work? | How To Use A Bloomberg Terminal For Trading : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFHfjhV4mIg
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bloomberg_Terminal

Software Bill of Materials: document your software supply chain

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

An SBOM is the dependency graph of software so that you can identify what is in its supply chain.

I have already opened the door to the idea that software developers draw inspiration from the physical product development process in a post published in December 2021: Take inspiration from the physical product development process.

Since then, I have been on the lookout for any publication that supports this opinion.

The concept of "bill of materials" or "BOM" is fundamental in the industry manufacturing. This is the list of materials required for crafting of a physical product. This list of ingredients is useful in different aspects design, production and service associated with the product during its useful life.

The idea of a "Software BOM" or "SBOM" is gaining traction in the software sphere. That is to say an exhaustive list of all components (libraries, binaries, etc.) necessary for a software product.

what is a BOM

"BOM" is the acronym for "bill of materials".

A bill of materials or product structure (sometimes bill of material, BOM or associated list) is a list of the raw materials, >sub-assemblies, intermediate assemblies, sub-components, parts, and the quantities of each needed to manufacture an end product. A BOM >may be used for communication between manufacturing partners or confined to a single manufacturing plant. A bill of materials is often >tied to a production order whose issuance may generate reservations for components in the bill of materials that are in stock and >requisitions for components that are not in stock. https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bill_of_materials)(2022-10-27), "Bill of materials"

Software Bill of Materials

The form and content of an SBOM is analogous to the traditional industry BOM manufacturer. It is a list or inventory of all the dependencies of a software system deployed in production:

Open-source libraries and subsystems from a third-party source. Their versions. The application status of the patches. And their license to use.

US government leading the pack

Solarwinds attack discovered in December 2020 targeted multiple agencies American public authorities, several private organizations as well as foreign institutions.

In early 2020, hackers secretly broke into Texas-based SolarWind's systems and added malicious code into the company's software system. The system, called "Orion," is widely used by companies to manage IT resources. Solarwinds has 33,000 customers that use Orion, according to SEC documents.

Most software providers regularly send out updates to their systems, whether it's fixing a bug or adding new features. SolarWinds is no >exception. Beginning as early as March of 2020, SolarWinds unwittingly sent out software updates to its customers that included the >hacked code. . Business Insider.com, "Solarwinds hack explained"

The U.S. government recently introduced an executive order requiring the production of "SBOM" for any software product developed by a sub-contractor.

December 2021 - log4j

Less than 1% of organizations document their supply chains software.

Shortly before the start of the holidays last year, most operators of computerized systems have had to work extra hard to address a critical vulnerability discovered in the popular logging bookstore log4j.

This is the world of IT without SBOM. Lots of stress and lots of work manual.

The few players with sound management of their supply chain handled the situation calmly and rigorously. They knew exactly on which systems they used the log4j library. While their colleagues were scanning dozens of servers, they had already patched their systems!

basic steps

The development and adoption of a common standard for the "Software Bill Of Materials" is fundamental to make the software supply chain more transparent. A standard format to facilitate the exchange of information would be a great first step.

Then, we must automate the generation of the SBOM. At each deployment we must generate a new SBOM. More and more organizations are deploying production several times a day. So it goes without saying that the generation of SBOM takes place in the Continuous Deployment and Continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes.

arguments against SBOM?

"Why wouldn't you want to know what your software systems are compounds? What are the advantages of not being able to inform your customers about what does the software you sell them contain?

We quickly fall into the absurd.

Having an up-to-date SBOM on hand will save you hundreds of hours of work. Will allow you to have safer products and easy to evolve.

In addition to reducing your operating costs, keep employee retention in mind, reducing their stress; the reduction of the feeling of powerlessness of your IT employees towards systems that they do not understand and are unable to change.

sources

https://malicious.life/episode/episode-183/

https://www.cisa.gov/sbom

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bill_of_materials

https://www.businessinsider.com/solarwinds-hack-explained-government-agencies-cyber-security-2020-12

Reinventing the wheel and changing the world

Mon, 15 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

The world of software development celebrates innovators. Those who challenge preconceptions and venture into uncharted waters.

But the development world also supports conformists and sloths.

Many dogmas are also erected to comfort the developers ways to persist the status quo:

a good programmer is a lazy programmer
don't reinvent the wheel

But we wouldn't have the opportunity to have our lives made easier by these tools without the risks and the strokes of genius of innovators who bet on starting from scratch.

René Descartes and the Method

René Descartes (1592-1650) is considered the father of modern philosophy. After studying in a respected Jesuit college, he broke away from the tradition and old books to contribute to the progress of sciences such as optics and geometry. He refused to submit to the principle of authority and rejected blind respect for philosophical tradition.

He published the Discourse on the Method, written in french, in 1637. At that time, the language of scholars was Latin. French was the language of the uneducated people.

Why write to be read by ordinary people?

Descartes maintained that every human had enough common sense to discover the truth for themselves. As long a sound method to to direct ones mind is followed, progress in knowledge is assured.

By writing this little treatise in popular language, Descartes demonstrates his confidence in his method of directing his mind to true knowledge.

To discover the truth, he invites the reader to doubt everything. Not to take any opinion for certain unless one has examined it closely.

The method begins with a methodical doubt. Absolute skepticism. But temporary skepticism.

If nothing is certain, not even what I see or what I can touch, on what fundamental certainty can I establish on my journey towards knowledge ?

I think. The evidence that a mind is thinking and doubting is the most certain thing in the world.

Thus Descartes inaugurated modern philosophy. A way of thinking no longer centered on the things of the world, but on the mind that thinks and knows. Sure, it's interesting to know biology, for example. But no science is more important than knowing the thinking mind.

Our mind is the fundamental unit of everything our knowledge.

David Heinemeier Hansson and Ruby on rails

David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) is a well-known figure among web developers. He is the creator of the famous framework Ruby on rails.

Ruby on Rails, also called RoR or Rails, is a free web framework written in Ruby. It follows the model-view-controller design pattern. It offers a structure that allows you to develop quickly and intuitively.

Wikipedia, "Ruby on rails"

A bit like for Descartes, the development of a credible web framework was felt as a necessity for DHH. As a web developer, his goal was building web applications faster and easier. His experience with existing technologies were still just as frustrating to him.

The guiding idea behind Ruby on rails was to foster a positive experience to the developers building their web application. He relied on his developer experience to release a polished framework that could be understood and appreciated by all developers.

sole master on board

[...] I took it into my head to consider that often there is not so much perfection in works composed of several parts, and made by hand from various masters, than in those for whom only one has worked.

Descartes, "Discourse on Method", second part

At the beginning of the adventure, DHH did not authorize any other contributor to make commits to the project. According to him, we must leave the vision of the project get established before letting other programmers contribute. The risk to ruin a codebase by too hasty collaboration is too big.

conclusion

I do not believe that one can dismiss out of hand the accusation of "reinventing the wheel". It is better to use existing tools than building ours from scratch. In the majority of circumstances, other developers have experienced challenges similar to ours. Solutions often more effective and elegant than our attempts are readily available online. Most programming languages have built-in tools for perform typical operations.

Descartes and David Heinemeier first experienced the absence of a satisfactorysolution as primary drivers of their projects. They have this in common that no solution existed to fulfill their visions.

Moreover, by creating a new system of thought or a new framework of web development, vision is paramount.

We can afford to reinvent the wheel if our vision promises considerable progress compared to the status quo.

translated from french by Google translate

sources

https://thisdeveloperslife.com/post/1-0-5-homerun

https://thisdeveloperslife.com/post/1-0-7-audacity

Skip Level One-on-Ones

Thu, 28 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Skip level One-on-Ones is not a new idea in the workplace's realm. But I had never heard of it until today.

Even the concept of One-on-Ones between an Individual Contributor (IC) and his manager was new to me until I joined the organization to which I have been working for about a year.

One-on-One is a regular meeting between an employee and his manager. This is not an evaluation of employee performance. It's a time dedicated to the employee to discuss with his manager his ideas, his ambitions and challenges at work.

"Ninety minutes of your time can enhance the quality of your subordinate's work for two weeks, or for some eighty-plus hours" Andy Grove - former CEO and Intel co-founder

Skip level One-on-Ones

"A skip level one-on-one is a meeting where you — as a senior manager, VP, or CEO — meet with people who within your or who aren't direct reports. They are a way for you to get more visibility into the day-to-day work that's happening and how your managers are doing."

The idea for a senior executive to meet with front-line employees regularly seems unrealistic. However, it is mentioned that at Netflix, of senior executives are able to meet more than 100 annually individual contributors.

Among management gurus, one maintains that it is a sound investment. It is said that it is by seeing the portion of time that a frame superior devotes to an aspect of the organization that we understand what is important to him.

"I'm comfortable stating that not having skip level 1 on 1s is abdicating your responsibility as someone who manages a manager." propos d'un One manager ['lighthouse blog'] spoke to even went as far as saying this above

Risks

Adopting the practice of skip level One-on-One is not without risks. Not only, this practice requires planning and requires more work. This practice breaks with the commonly accepted 'Chain of command' culture; A hierarchical, almost military vision of the workplace. We must therefore anticipate discomfort on the part of contributors individuals who do not have the opportunity to discuss frankly with senior direction. Especially if they suspect and abhor the inherent politics of any interaction unrelated to their day-to-day work performance.

Are the managers under your leadership going to feel their role restored? question?

As an individual contributor, can I get into trouble talking openly with a senior executive?

Advantages

The individual contributor role is to contribute to the success of his team and organization. The role of the manager is to ensure the best performance of his team. And senior manager's role (manager of managers) is to develop the leadership skills of its managers. Ensure the culture and desired behaviors within their department.

According to Ben Horowitz, partner at the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, the role of a CEO is to improve the communication architecture and the flow of information within his organization.

Meeting on a cyclical basis with individual contributors allows senior leaders to know what is going on in their organization.

It's an investment that pays off.

Allows the senior executive to help their managers grow by offering them mentorship;
Allows teams to improve by knowing their objectives and challenges;
Gives the opportunity to recognize and encourage good moves;
Reduce the rate of staff turnover by detecting and remedying dissatisfaction that cannot be addressed by their immediate superior.

What would socraticDev discuss at a Skip Level One-on-One?

First, it is as an individual contributor that it would take place 😀

I would take a moment with a senior leader in my organization to exchange information.

Of course, I would be happy to discuss the projects that are close to my heart.

Above all, I would take the opportunity to ask questions about the health of the projects in Classes. On the obstacles to come. On what the success of a project or a product means to him/her.

translated from french by Google Translate

sources

https://getlighthouse.com/blog/skip-level-meetings-one-on-ones/

https://softskills.audio/2022/07/25/episode-314-that-guy-and-how-to-skip-level/

Neuromancer, part 4

Sun, 03 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

(final update: sunday july 10th 2022)

part four - The Straylight Run

Case and Molly executes their mission: a run in Tessier-Ashpool's Villa Straylight. It becomes clear who their employer is: Wintermute. Wintermute is an AI trying to increase its power. By law, AI are not supposed to be autonomous. By getting humans into situations, Wintermute defies the law to achieve its goal.

chapter 13 - Turing, you are under arrest!

Back to his hotel, Case gets arrested by the three French "teenagers" he had noticed earlier. They are not teenagers, but members of the Turing police. A law enforcement agency dedicated to enforce laws linked to artificial intelligence (AI).

"They explain he is under arrest and the charges 'have to do with conspiracy to augment an artificial intelligence'."

While being escorted outside his hotel, the police agents get attacked and killed by various elements of the urban landscape. Case escapes. He knows it was Wintermute setting him free.

"Michèle, Pierre, and Roland escort Case out of the hotel. As they walk across a footbridge, an autonomous microlight swings down out of the sky, partially decapitating Pierre. Case makes a break for it, and although Roland chases after him, a gardening robot falls from a tree, killing him as well."

chapter 14 - the chinese virus

Case and Molly start the mission.

Dixie encourages Case to use a virus: the chinese virus.

"Back in the matrix, Dixie explains the virus to Case. It’s a slow virus, so slow the ice won’t even notice it."

Trying to jack into Molly, Case is blocked by Finn/Wintermute. They teach Case how to make the mission a success.

"The Finn/Wintermute explains that the head is a “ceremonial terminal,” and that Molly needs to speak the “right word at the right time,” when the virus has made it deep into the system. The virus is necessary, but without the magic word, the mission will not be completed. Wintermute doesn’t know the word, and can never know the word. After it’s spoken, he will cease to exist."

Finn/Wintermutre informs Case, before letting him leave, that Armitage is starting to lose his mind.

chapter 15 - in the Villa Straylight

Case is finally able to connect to Molly. While moving around the Villa Straylight, she tells him the story of Johnny. Johnny was her boyfriend. She found him dead at her place. The Yakuza had him killed as a vengeance because she had killed one of their men.

"I knew Johnny was up there. But this little guy, he caught my eye, as he was coming out. Didn't say a word. We just looked at each other and I knew. Plain little guy, plain clothes, no pride in him, humble. He looked at me and got into a pedicab. I knew. Went upstairs and Johnny was sitting in a chair by the window, with his mouth a little open, like he'd just thought of something to say."

Molly never had another boyfriend after Johnny.

Molly enters a room where a man was. His name was Ashpool. Molly was interrupting his suicide attempt. By alcohol and pills.

Ashpool keeps Molly in respect by pointing a gun at her. He explains he had been frozen for the last 30 years. Villa Straylight computer system had woken him up. In turn he had his daughter, Jane, unfrozen.

During his explanation he fell asleep. Molly took his gun. Exploring the room, she discovers he had killed Jane as she lay dead in his bed.

Molly takes out her fletcher, puts it in single dart mode, and kills Ashpool with a shot between the eyes.

chapter 16 - Armitage losing his mind

Case gets a call from Armitage. He is next door, in his ship. Armitage sounds like he had lost his mind. He questions Case about Wintermute: "Does he appear as General Girling?".

Molly's broken leg is starting to hurt.

Maelcum receives an order from Zion to abandon the mission and come back. He offers Case to bring him back to Zion. But Case refuses to abandon Molly.

Connected to Dixie, Case learns that another Tessier-Ashpool heir, 8Jean, is alive in Australia. He was to fly back to Freeside having learned about Ashpool's death. His arrival would coincide with the moment when the chinese virus, Kuang, would have had breached Tessier-Ashpool's core.

Armitage/Corto video calls another time. He is acting up, wanting to escape. He thinks he is in an airplane and can eject above Finland. He is truly delirious.

"Case screams and even cries, but he’s unable to do anything. Maelcum, checking a wall monitor, tells Case that Corto is gone. The hatch separating the escape pod from the rest of the ship was slightly open, meaning that it shouldn’t have been able to eject, given it would not be airtight and Corto would die. However, Wintermute overrode the ejection failsafe, allowing Corto to launch even though it was unsafe."

Wintermute killed Armitage. Letting him eject into space.

chapter 17 - goodbye Molly

Armitage gone, Case worries about the toxin sacs attached into his body. Wintermute assures him it will take care of it after the mission's over.

After the mission's over, Wintermute will disappear by fusionning into a greater being. Who/what? Wintermute doesn't know yet.

Hurt, Molly walks around Straylight. She encounters various holograms generated by Riviera.

"Molly continues down the hallway, passing more holograms—scenes of torture, monsters, and finally a little diorama that Molly has to bend down to see. In it, a cluster of feral children surround a soldier, feeding on him. Disgusted, Molly stands. She recognizes now more than ever how disturbed Riviera is, but also that his dysfunction is what drew 3Jane to him and convinced her to let him into her fortress. "

"Molly continues to walk. She approaches a gash in the wall of the tunnel: the entrance to 3Jane’s world. She raises her hand to her mouth and kisses it—a goodbye kiss to Case. Then she descends the staircase."

chapter 18 - Molly fails at the mission

Molly fails at the mission of getting the magic word out of 3Jane. Molly collapsed entering 3Jane's lair. Riviera had joined force with 3Jane. So Molly is basically held captive by him and Hideo, 3Jane's bodyguard.

Case, Maelcum and Finn/Wintermute have to take matter into their own hands and be there when 3Jane will have to utter the secret word to the automaton head.

They have to act fast because 8Jean, the other living Tessier-Ashpool heir, will soon be back to the Villa Straylight.

chapter 19 - the master's return

Case and Maelcum take advantage of the Villa's staff expecting their master, 8Jean, returns. They easily get the hatch's door opened since the staff thought it would be their master's ship docking.

On her end, Molly still tries to get the word out of 3Jane. No success.

chapter 20 - back to Linda

Case jacks in a different reality. He ends up on a beach, on gray sand. He finds a woman sleeping. She is Linda: his former girlfriend.

Case realizes this world is a simulation generated by the other AI; not Wintermute.

chapter 21 - refuse the illusion

On the beach, Case meets the other AI: Neuromancer. It embodied the shape of a boy. Neuromancer invites Case to stop his mission and stay within it, with Linda.

Case refuses.

chapter 22 - everyone together

Case and Maelcum reaches 3Jane's lair. They are confronted by Hideo who shoots arrows at them. Maelcum gets injured from one.

3Jane and the crew move toward the Villa's core.

Without Riviera who had been poisonned by 3Jane.

chapter 23 - at the core

"Case flips into Molly’s simstim; Molly is choking 3Jane to get her to say the code. Case jacks out. He turns towards 3Jane and tells her to give them the code. He threatens her, warning her that if she doesn’t give up the code, she’ll be trapped in Straylight forever, and nothing will ever change for her." https://www.litcharts.com/lit/neuromancer/chapter-23

coda: departure and arrival

"Wintermute won, combining with Neuromancer. They spoke together from the platinum head, explaining they erased the Turing records and all records of the crimes Molly, Case, and their team had committed. Money was deposited in bank accounts for both Case and Molly, as well as accounts belonging to Zion. Even Case’s toxin sacs were taken care of—the new entity had gotten deep into his brain and taught it how to dissolve the bonds on the toxin sacs itself." https://www.litcharts.com/lit/neuromancer/chapter-24

sources

https://www.litcharts.com/lit/neuromancer/chapter-{13:24}

Neuromancer, part 3

Mon, 20 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

(final update: friday july 1st)

Part three - Midnight in the rue Jules-Verne

The third and last part of William Gibson's Neuromancer starts on page 101 and ends on page 271. The whole crew leaves Earth and flies toward Freeside: a Man built exclave orbiting the Earth. Every member of Armitage's cherry-picked crew is there for a reason. A specific skill set, or a destiny.

Chapter 8 - welcome to Zion

En route to Freeside they stop on Zion. A space station colonized by relaxed Rastafarians. In fact the founding fathers were construction workers hired to build a "gravity tunnel" between Freeside and Earth, but escaped the toil to build their own little paradise above Earth.

Armitage, Molly, Case and Riviera stays in Zion for 80 hours to get used to zero gravity. In a space that smells cooked vegetables and ganja. Dub is always playing as background music. Molly says it's about "worship", a sense of "community".

Despite being a cowboy working in cyberspace, Case still needs to be physically at ease. Zero gravity makes him secrete more adrenaline. Which is bad.

He suffers from SAS: Space Adaptation Syndrome. A kind of motion sickness experienced when travelling to zero gravity conditions.

In this chapter we get to see more of Riviera's antics. He is a joker who uses his skills to surrounds himself by weird holograms: a snake around his arm or spermatozoids in Case's drink.

Chapter 9 - grappling with Wintermute

"Maelcum transports Case and Molly from Zion to Freeside on his ship, the Marcus Garvey."

During the flight, Case first connect to Dixie in order to ask him more questions about Wintermute. Dixie recalls having met an AI (artificial intelligence) owned by Tessier-Ashpool. It was in Rio. Not in Berne, like for Wintermute. Dixie warns him that such an encounter can be lethal.

Nevertheless, Dixie and Case travel to Switzerland in the cyberspace. Case witnesses Wintermute: a cube made out of light. A distinct shape appeared from the cube. A gray face. Dixie ordered Case to disconnect. But it was too late.

Case experienced a serie of hallucinations while his body, still in the ship traveling to Freeside, beside Molly, was flatlining (clinically dead).

He met his former girlfriend, Linda, in an arcade.

Then at his friend Julius Deane's office, he met Wintermute. Wintermute took the traits of Julie. Wintermute admits having used Linda to communicate with him.

Wintermute explains its goal. As an AI it is seeking more autonomy. It is using Armitage and his crew for this.

About Armitage, Wintermute warns Case that he is about to burn out. Armitage is only a shell around a severely mentally ill person.

Before leaving, Case shot Wintermute/Julie in the face with their own gun.

Chapter 10 - Freeside, rue Jules-Verne

Case and Molly arrive to Freeside. Molly takes care of customs.

"Customs, for Freeside, consisted mainly of proving your credit"

Still sick from SAS, Case goes to sleep. He dreamed about a teenage love. In the dream, he used a flame thrower to destroy a wasp nest. He noticed the nest was stamped by the Tessier-Ashpool logo.

The author offers a rich description of this artificial exclave orbiting the Earth. Fake sky, fake sun, fake trees, etc.

Case goes out shopping for a space vacuum-suit.

After analyzing a computer virus handed by Malcaeum. He uses his Osaka computer then he connects to Dixie to ask for his help.

Before returning to the hotel, Case gets hold of stimulant drugs that can bypass his new pancreas filter. He gets really high and, back at the hotel, Molly is very disapointed. She warns him of the aftermath of such a drug strong enough to bypass his pancreas blockers.

Chapter 11 - focus on Riviera and Molly

Case woke up with a hangover. Molly and Armitage noticed his recent excess. But Case tries to hide it and blames an allergic reaction to the unusual food served on Freeside.

Armitage, Molly and Case goes to a cabaret to assist to Riviera holographic show: "The Doll".

"Riviera’s performance is designed to be disturbing and titillating, intended to capture the attention of 3Jane, a member of the Tessier Ashpool family, whose tastes Armitage, Wintermute, and Riviera have explored. However, Riviera also intends to disturb and offend his coworkers—specifically Molly who he seems to lust after but also resent. Although not technically real, his show is disturbing, and creates real emotions of disgust and distress in Case and Molly." https://www.litcharts.com/lit/neuromancer/chapter-11

Molly disappears from the cabaret. Case returns to hotel and has another encounter with Wintermute.

Case finally gets an address for where to find Molly. She's in a cubicule coffin located in the basement of a nightclub. Case shows up at the front desk to realize it's a kind of brothel. He rents a cubicle near Molly's. Instead of settling into his unit, he knocks at Molly's door.

Molly discloses her past as a sex doll. A sex doll is a woman who rents her body without being conscious of her encounters. A "cut-off chip" is implanted in her brain to prevent the doll of being conscious while being on duty. Molly's chip was likely tampered with when she got metal blades implanted in lieu of nails. Once she became conscious of being beaten up by a client. A major political man. She woke up and killed him.

This is the reason Molly is always on the run. Escaping her former employer.

Case and Molly concludes Wintermute is putting them into situations to trigger hatred; to manipulate them.

"She thinks Wintermute somehow set up his show, so that she would hate Riviera and be motivated to go in to Straylight after him. She tells Case she’s going to kill Riviera. Case tells Molly about the Lonny Zone and Linda Lee. Molly wonders if Wintermute is trying to get him to hate something, too. "

chapter 12 - Turing police.

In the last chapter of Part three - Midnight in the Rue Jules-Verne, Case reflects on his addiction to drugs; his reflex to numbing himself.

He meets his new friend and drug soulmate Cath at a bar. She talks about 3Jane and her bodyguard. 3Jane is an heiress to the family Tessier-Ashpool. Cath presents a derm containing Case's new favorite substance.

Case walks around while being high. Back to his hotel room, he is met by "two men and a woman -- the Turing police.

"Turing," she said. "You are under arrest."

Neuromancer, part 2

Sun, 05 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

(last updated: friday 2022-06-17)

chapter 3 (part 2 - The shopping expedition)

By the end of chapter 3, Case would have connected to cyberspace, to the Matrix.

Matrix: "Has its roots in primitive arcade games. Early graphic programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks."

cyberspace: "A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts..."

the Finn

Molly and Case gets to integrate a new team member: the Finn. Unofficially, behind Armitage's back, they consult the Finn to scan their bodys. Have they gotten new implants they weren't aware off? Molly goes first and confirms a list of known implants. The Finn reveals, about Case:

"Guy's a virgin. Some cheap dental work, is all."

They also discuss Armitage's identity and goals. The Finn reveals that Armitage is just following orders. From whom? He doesn't know. But he knows the orders are not coming from a government, the japanese mafia, or japanese big conglomerate (zaibatsu).

Molly

Molly brings Case over to Manhattan for a real breakfast. In fact her main objective is to visit the Finn.

Case notices that Molly is at home in the Sprawl. The Sprawl, also known as BAMA (Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis), is a urban area where the Matrix and data are flowing. Especially in a few blocks of Manhattan and a century old industrial area of Atlanta.

"her Sprawl wasn't his [...] She'd led him through a dozen bars and clubs he'd never seen before, taking care of business, usually with no more than a nod. Maintaining connections."

Armitage

Case have a hard time remembering his trip back home from Japan. Only airports and some shopping trips with Molly: Narita, Schipol, Orly. He remembers a train trip with Molly to their final destination:

A large empty room. "Blank walls, no windows, a single white-painted steel door. The walls were coated with countless layers of white latex paint. Factory space."

Armitage adds precision about Case's mission. Specifically about his new pancreas and treatment of his impaired nervous system.

Armitage explains that, during surgery, fifteen toxin sacs containing a mycotoxin have been "bonded to the lining of various main arteries". The sacs will slowly desintegrate and release a toxin similar to the one Case had been plagued with. Toxins that had destroyed his nervous system.

Only after the end of this mission would Armitage provide a remedy to this predicament.

Case is held hostage to this new dependency.

chapter 4 - the heist

In chapter 4, the duo enters action by setting up and executing a heist in Sense/net building. Case immersed himself in the Matrix for a good 9 days, but the action is considerably shortened into a tight chapter. Armitage mission was getting hold of Dixie Flatline: a 'construct' stored in the Sense/net building's library.

A construct is "A ROM recording of a personality which allows for a reconstruction of that person."

Case remained in the loft hooked to his Sendai and SimStim. A SimStim is a way to embody another person; to feel his sensations. Case embodied Molly who moved thru the Sprawl to prepare and execute the heist. He can feel what she feels, sees what she sees. But cannot communicate with her; tell her what to do.

For 9 days, he stayed in the cyberspace or under Molly's skin.

At an electronic marketplace, Molly met with Larry. A shady personage who put her in touch with the Panther Moderns.

The Moderns is "a global group of teenage hackers and pranksters, who can be purchased by outside groups."

They will assist Molly creating chaos at the Sense/net building in order to steal the construct of Dixie Flatline. A notable trait of the Moderns is their camouflage suits; they can blend with their surroundings like chameleons!

Molly got badly hurt during the heist. To escape the building, she had to numb her pain with endorphines. Then she went under surgery.

Back to the loft, Armitage received the construct from Yonderboy (the leader of the Panther Moderns) against a thick stack of money as payment.

Younderboy tells Armitage why he wouldn't count the money:

"You'll pay. You're a Mr. Who. You pay to stay one. Not a Mr. Name."

Despite this, Yonderboy delivers a message to Case. A name.

Wintermute.

chapter 5 - Tessier-Ashpool

We will learn more about the power behind the operation for which Case has been hired in chapter 5.

Tessier-Ashpool

Molly had commissioned the Panther Moderns to investigate Armitage. After the heist, its leader Younderboy presented Case with the answer: WINTERMUTE. Back to New York, Case and Molly visit the Finn to continue their clandestine investigation on Armitage.

"Wintermute is an artificial intelligence. Based in Berne, it has swiss citizenship. Wintermute is running Armitage, but, because AIs aren't allowed autonomy, both Molly and the Finn assume it's Wintermute's owners, Tessier-Ashpool S.A., who owns the mainframe and software, who are pulling Armitage's strings."

Tessier-Ashpool S.A. is a law firm, a shell corporation set up to represent and protect the interests of the Tessier-Ashpool family. This family owns Freeside: "An enormous space colony in orbit above earth".

This family is composed of dead family members who are frozen and brought back to life in alternance to manage the family affairs.

Dixie-Flatline

Back to the loft, Case connects to Dixie Flatline. He notices the construct doesn't have any short term memory. It is a ROM. It is a finite collection of memories. Dixie was Case's mentor when he started his career. His memories are useful to Case to learn new informations about the Matrix and Armitage.

"Read Only Memory. A type of computer storage that is more or less unchangeable. The construct of Dixie, for example, is ROM—his personality is already fixed and cannot be developed. Contrast with RAM."

chapter 6 - Armitage

Plugged into Dixie Flatline, Case digs into Armitage's past. He discovers Armitage was colonel Willis Corto. USA had sent Corto and his crew to attack Russia in an operation called "Screaming Fist". It was basically a death trap because it was known that Russia had the power to defend themselves against this attack.

Long story short, colonel Corto was disfigured and severly maimed. He testified before Congress about the betrayal. After this, he was involved in random missions, such as contract killings. Finally involved with a crime in France, he ended up in a psychiatric hospital with a schizophrenia diagnosis.

He was cured by an experimental therapy, disappeared, and now he is Armitage.

At the end of chapter 6, Armitage calls to announce they are going to Istanbul.

chapter 7 - Riviera

The Finn, Case and Molly meet again in Istanbul for a kidnapping mission.

Their target is Riviera. Riviera has a specific skill. He can project lifelike hologram; create illusion and hallucination in others. How? He got one lung replaced by implants that give him this power.

Helped by a local "guide", Terzibashjian, they captured him in a market while he was out at the market to purchase his drugs.

Armitage tells them to pack for their next destination: the Freeside.

"An enormous space colony in orbit above earth. Home to, among other institutions, the Villa Straylight and the Tessier-Ashpool family."

At the end of the second part, Wintermute reaches out to Case by making pay phone rings: "Hello Case... Wintermute, Case. It's time to talk.[...] Don't you want to talk, Case?".

End of second part

sources

Neuromancer, part 1

Fri, 27 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

"Case was the sharpest data thief in the Matrix, until an ex-employer crippled his nervous system. Now a new employer has recruited him for a last-chance run against an unthinkably powerful artificial intelligence."

chapter one

Main protagonist of William Gibson's novel Neuromancer, Case hits rock bottom in a lawless urban area in futuristic Japan. He learns someone wants to kill him for unpaid debts and all hell breaks loose. After getting high on a stimulant named "Dex", Case acquires a baton and rents a pistol and bullets to defend himself.

In chapter 1 of Neuromancer, we are introduced to a nervous cyberspace cowboy who has nothing to loose. It's unclear if this main character is looking to get rid of Wage, the man who allegedly wants to kill him, or if he's just randomly trying to escape someone covertly following him thru this dangerous neighborhood.

Chapter 1 begins and ends at a comfortable bar called "Chat". After a crazy escape from an industrial/office building, Case finally gets to confront Wage at the bar. Under the protection of the bartender holding a riot gun to Wage's face, Case and Wage settles their dispute.

Chapter 1 really ends at Case's temporary home: the Cheap hotel. There he rents a coffin-sized room on a weekly basis. Noticing the lock had been tempered with, thinking it is most likely a sign of his ex-girlfriend Linda's visit, he nevertheless gets back into his cell. He is welcomed by the "pepperbox muzzle of a flechette pistol". He meets Molly, a hired bodyguard tasked to bring back Case to her Employer. He wont argue with this surgically improved woman who has grey mirrors for eyes and whose nails are ten retractable scalpel knives.

chapter two

getting healthy

Case gets his nerve damages fixed and a new pancreas. Molly escorts Case to a Chiba's clinic where Case gets put under anesthesia:

blood got replaced
pancreas got patched
lots of injections to cure his nerve damages

Before surgery, Case got to meet Armitage: his new Employer. Armitage flexing his military past convinces Case to quit his struggle in Japan's Night City to start working as a jockey again. Before moving back to the Sprawl, Armitage will provide Case the health treatment he first came to Chiba to look for.

"Like he's gonna pay these nerve boys for fixing you with the program he's giving them to tell them how to do it. He'll put them three years ahead of the competition. You got any idea what that's worth?" Molly to Case

saying goodbye

Case insists on meeting Julie again before leaving Japan for good. Julius Dean, aka Julie, is a 135 year old traffiker who entertains a paradoxal relationship with Case. Julie provides informations about Armitage to Case. These informations confirms Armitage's identity. However, it becomes clear by the end of this chapter that Julie is all business. Ready to kill a friend's friend to save a bit of money and effort...

Chapter 2 ends at a venue where a knife fight gala is underway. The fight fascinates Molly but bores Case.

Case escapes the show by going to the food stall to get food and drinks. Returning to his seat, he sees Linda (ex-girlfriend) and tries to run to her. But he gets tripped and falls. He gets attacked by a "thin boy" with "spiked blond hair". Alas his bodyguard Molly was looking out for him and sends an array of flechettes to the boy to save Case.

Walking back, Case looks down and sees Linda. "She was thrown down at the foot of a concrete pillar, eyes closed".

Molly explained that his only "friend" left at Night City, Julie, had ordered the execution.

I want to be functional

Sat, 26 Mar 2022 00:00:00 GMT

I wasn't taught functional programming in school. Workplaces didn't use it explicitely. Nevertheless, I've been intrigued about this other way of programming for some times.

Now that I have time and motivation, I've picked up a reliable book about it: Michael Fogus(2013), Functional Javascript: Introducting Functional Programming with Underscore.js

Learning starts when ackowledging your ignorance about a topic. It is a humbling moment that should be used as a springboard to self-improvement.

basic concepts

Functional programming differs from imperative and object-oriented programming. Its basic element is the function. It encourages another way of programming softwares. "Programs are constructed by applying and composing functions". Instead of explicitely programming steps in which a running state is modified by the program, functional programming is a "declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that map values to other values"

First-class functions are a prerequisite to functional programming. When we say a programming language has first-class functions, it means that the language lets us use function as a variable. A functional programming language lets us assign a function to a variable, let's us pass a function as arguments to other functions, and let's us return a function as a value returned from another function. Moreover, in functional programming a function name doesn't matter. We most likely gonna use anonymous functions: a function without name:

const squared = (a) => a * a

variables scope is fundational. It has many definitions but you can't go wrong by defining scope as the "lifetime" of a variable.

Other definitions (close to JavaScript realm):

The value of the this binding
The execution context defined by the value of the this binding
The variable value resolution scheme, or the lexical bindings

Variable binding is something that is above my understand for the moment. I think knowing about the behavior of variables within global and lexical scopes is a must for a programmer. If you need something stronger, go study Dynamic Scoping!

Closures is where functional programming gets really interesting. A closure is writing a function to capture variables in its scope and "package it" in a function that retains the values for use in a different scope.

To me, from the get go, it's an awesome solution to a common real life programming problem: when you had access to a variable, but not anymore. With a closure, you can return a function containing the values you need where you don't have access to them anymore.

Operationally, a closure is a record storing a function[a] together with an environment.[1] The environment is a mapping associating each free variable of the function (variables that are used locally, but defined in an enclosing scope) with the value or reference to which the name was bound when the closure was created.[b] Unlike a plain function, a closure allows the function to access those captured variables through the closure's copies of their values or references, even when the function is invoked outside their scope. (Wikipedia, "closure")

example of leveraging closure

function createScaleFunction(FACTOR) {
  return function(v) {
    return _.map(v, function(n) {
      return (n * FACTOR);
    });
  };
}

var scale10 = createScaleFunction(10);

scale10([1,2,3]);
//=> [10, 20, 30]

learnings

Digging into functional programming I discover a lot about my lack of understanding into some programming language (especially JavaScript) basic fonctions such as variable binding and scoping. I'm also learning to understand about functions chaining. Which was/is a big pet peeve of mine: it's not fun debugging function chains. No??

Nexst steps will be getting into higher-order functions, function-building functions and currying, immutability, and flow-based programming.

Cannot wait!

sources

https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/functional-javascript/9781449360757/

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Functional_programming

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-class_function

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Closure_(computer_programming)

A short guide to the perfect job seeker

Sun, 20 Feb 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Employers go to great lengths to ensure a perfect match in the recruitment process. But what about job seekers?

The job market has become much friendlier to job seekers. However, it should not be assumed that employers are ready to hire just anyone. Especially for jobs requiring a high level of qualification.

A poor match between employer and employee is a net loss for both parties. For example, a qualified developer will quickly leave a firm asking him to offer telephone support to his users. Or a studio specializing in the web will not know how to take advantage of a programmer who insists on coding only in Cobol (a very old programming language).

Communicating your story - what makes you unique

Be ready to sell yourself. A standard resume is insufficient. Be able to summarize yourself in 10 seconds.

The candidate's first duty is to get to know himself; know their strengths and their identity. It's quick 10 seconds, so cut to the chase: "this is where I come from and this is who I am". Then, make the connection with the position for which you are applying. How are you the ideal person to fill this position?

Warning! your story should be reusable. As part of your job, you often meet new people. Take advantage of these opportunities to hone your self-presentation!

By the way, if you've worked as an exterminator for a while, you can omit this point from your elevator pitch. Unless you want to be labeled as the vermin killer...

Know who you are talking to

Before speaking in public, it is essential to know your audience. Will you be talking to people with a technical background or to non-technical managers?

It is acceptable to ask for the names of people who will be present at the meetings. It is equally acceptable to search LinkedIn.com to discover their backgrounds.

Adapt the way you sell yourself. Put yourself in your audience's shoes. What are their needs? Why are they looking for new talent?

Show off your core competencies

Compared to hyper-specialized technical skills, fundamental skills are worth more. Make sure you don't paint yourself into a corner!

For a developer, the trap would be to be confined to a very specific niche where he excels. For example, we sometimes see developers defining themselves as .Net developer. Is having only worked in the Microsoft ecosystem really an advantage over a more flexible developer? Being able to adapt to the technological tools used by different organizations is a strength.

Fundamental skills will allow you to learn and master the technologies used in your new job more quickly. For example, this organization uses a different cloud provider than the one you are used to using? No problem because you know the basics of cloud computing and you will quickly be able to locate equivalent resources in the new ecosystem.

examples of fundamental computer skills

algorithms and data structures
object-oriented programming
OSI model
SOLID principles

Truly foundational skills

Beyond technical skills, soft skills are probably the quintessence of skills.

Are you able to collaborate well with others? How do you react to complex or problematic situations?

No non-trivial project can be completed by a lone wolf developer. You will therefore have to work with other developers, business people, and even customers.

Be prepared to explain, using past experiences, how you have achieved success despite the difficulties inherent to the complex projects in which you have participated.

communication

We talk about communication in many ways. For me, the biggest communication challenge is listening. I confess that I often have the reflex to talk more than I listen. Sometimes even cutting off my interlocutor. Of course it is a sin, but as soon as we become aware of the importance of communication. Each exchange with others becomes an opportunity to improve.

empathy

Knowing how to put yourself in another person's shoes is a quality called 'empathy'. Once you have mastered your 'elevator pitch', focus on that of your partners.

"You can observe a lot by just watching." -- Yogi Berra

The purpose of the interview, for both parties, is to determine if this is a perfect match. Will the employer's needs be met by the candidate? Will the position and the organization allow the candidate to achieve their personal goals and career goals?

Thus, one must listen to the other party with perfect attention.

What is said and what is not.

For example, if the recruiter only talks about the benefits of the position: vacation, insurance, etc. We have to wonder why we are not told about the technological challenges of the position as such. (Of course, if the nature of the job doesn't matter to you and you're just looking for a position that allows you to be on vacation often, then this is a perfect match...)

Do your research on the organization

The candidate must inform himself about the organization for which he is applying. What is their area of business? Who are its main customers? Who are its founders? their story?

Usually a quick read of the organization's website is enough to prepare you.

Ask questions

A candidate asking questions is a sign of a candidate interested in the role offered.

Have a bank of questions to ask your interviewer. The course of the interview will allow you to determine, in the heat of the moment, which are relevant to ask.

This is a crucial time to determine if the organization is a perfect match for your expectations.

Make sure you have your bullshit detector turned on. If an answer is vague or if it is corporate jargon, it is acceptable to politely mention to the other party that their answer does not satisfy you.

Choosing to move forward is too big a decision for your life. It is wiser to pass if the first contacts do not satisfy you.

Practice practice practice

It is by interviewing regularly that you will become better.

Don't wait until you're unemployed before taking action.

There is nothing unfair about discussing with recruiters the needs of the organizations they represent. This allows you to have an adequate portrait of the labor market for your profile.

Of course, the media repeat that employers are snapping up employees. But this is a general portrait of the job market. Are all these positions to be filled roles that will allow you to flourish? I do not believe.

As you gain experience, the range of roles that may be suitable for you narrows. You know more and more the reality of the sector. You have more specific selection criteria and objectives.

Don't miss the chance to land a role tailored to you!

suggestion

The weekly podcast Soft Skills Engineering is an endless source of information and advice on jobs in the software development industry.

The podcast hosts have also created a small virtual community on Slack.

It's worth it.

Translated from french by google translate

between shell, bash and others

Thu, 27 Jan 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Any computerized system is a complex structure based on several layers of software protocols and hardware elements. The OSI model starts from the physical layer, electrical impulses to end on the application layer. For ordinary mortals, the application layer is an attractive user interface (UI for user interface): a web or mobile application.

Usually, for developers, the application layer presents itself as functionalities made available via textual commands typed on a keyboard and viewed on a terminal.

another analogy

The linux model is based on a kernel, a software kernel orchestrating the interactions between software and hardware. The outer layer, the software shell, is called in English shell. In the Unix/Unix-like world, the computer scientist accesses the power of the system through a software shell like shell, bash or zsh.

"The term 'shell' originates from terminology used with early Unix-like operating systems where it had the more specific meaning to designate the highest layer of Unix system interfaces, as opposed to the low-level layer, called the kernel.

The first American computer designers used to describe the different software layers of a system by an analogy: that of the kernel and the nutshell.

The word "kernel" refers to the edible part of the nut. This is the part enclosed in the shell. The hull being the inedible part of the fruit, called "shell" in English. The underlying idea being that "to access the edible (useful) part, you have to go through the shell".

POSIX

POSIX is an acronym for Portable Operating System Interface. A technical standard defined in 1988 by the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). It is a set of standards prescribed to ensure the interoperability of different computerized systems. Input and output services (IO), user interfaces (Bourne shell) as well as utility commands like awk and echo are characterized.

This standard dating from the late 1980s ensures compatibility between different operating systems. For example, Microsoft Windows NT 3.0, 4.0 are POSIX certified.

However, the standard is not perfect. Some bugs remain and several innovations are not supported. Therefore, not being 'POSIX compliant' is not a defect in itself.

sh or Bourne Shell

sh or Bourne shell is a command programming language following the POSIX standard. Its advantage is compatibility with different systems. This language uses the syntax and semantics of older programming languages; mostly ALGOL68.

A sh script will therefore run smoothly on a bash running system. It is the most portable scripting language. We are sure that it can be executed on any POSIX, UNIX and UNIX-like system.

bash or Bourne Again Shell

bash or Bourne Again Shell is a programming language that takes some features of sh while enriching it. This is the default shell of most GNU/Linux distributions. It is not POSIX certified but still conforms to some standards like IEEE POSIX Shell and Tools.

bash is still very portable within the GNU/Linux ecosystem. It is found in the same place on almost all our systems: /bin/bash.

One may prefer bash for its richness of features in terms of programming and interactive use.

bash vs. sh

bash	sh
Bourne Again SHell	SHell
developed by Brain Fox	développé par Stephen R. Bourne
successor to sh	prédécesseur de bash
more features	less features
is not POSIX compliant	is POSIX compliant
easy to use	more difficult to use than bash
less portable than sh	more portable than bash
bash scripting is specific to bash environment	sh scripting targets all shells
implements `history` command	does not implement `history` command

zsh and others delusions

Z shell or zsh is the default software shell on the MacOS operating system. Many GNU/linux users also like to use this shell because of its functionality and pleasing aesthetics.

The first version of zsh was written by Paul Falstad in 1990, while a student at Princeton University. The name "zsh" comes from Zhong Shao, a Yale professor and teaching assistant at Princeton University. Paul Falstad thought that Shao's login identifier, "zsh", was a suitable name for a shell.

(from wikipedia)

In particular, zsh provides the following features:

Completion of commands, options and arguments of most commands. In particular, typing the sequence of characters “cd ” will only allow completion by directories.
Very advanced "Globbing" or "Expansion [archive]" functions
Sharing command history between all currently active zsh shells.
Improved use of variables and arrays.
Editing of multi-line commands in a single buffer.
"Spelling" correction of typed commands.
Several compatibility modes (zsh can for example be seen as a bourne shell when executed as /bin/sh).
Customizable command prompt, with the ability to display information on the right side of the screen that disappears if the command typed is too long.
zsh supports Unicode since version 4.32 and is more flexible and lightweight than bash[ref. necessary], in particular thanks to a division of the code into dynamically loadable modules.

translated from french by google translate

sources

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interface_système

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-sh-and-bash/

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_Shell

Take inspiration from the physical product development process

Wed, 29 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Robert States is a mechanical engineer specializing in the design of plastic products. Interviewed about his experience as a partner in the consulting firm Stress Engineering Services inc., the engineer describes himself as the character of the film Pulp Fiction: Winston Wolf. This character played by Harvey Keitel called urgently to cover up the result of a murder committed in a car by one of the main characters of the film.

"I am Winston Wolfe. I solve problems."

"It's about 30 minutes away, I'll be there in 10."

In this problem-solving interview, Robert States highlights the benefits of a consulting firm in the development of manufactured products for highly regulated industries such as the medical industry.

As a software developer, my curiosity was aroused: does the software industry have any lessons to learn from the process of designing physical products?

In terms of long-term reliability.

Think hard software!

'Been there, done that' mindset

The advantage of an experienced consultant is to have experienced the same difficulties and to have solved them over and over again. When the engineer is involved in the design process, he is able to plan the critical steps; where the team is going to have difficulty. Especially its contribution by offering robust and proven solutions.

In addition, the engineer offers a predictive analysis approach. This is the development of physical products based on advanced simulations. Model-based simulations improve product reliability and accuracy. If the product does not perform as expected, either the model is incorrect or the product contains flaws that must be detected.

four product development anti-patterns leading to failure

Robert States lists four common ways that lead to product development failures.

When the engineer asks the project managers 'How did you get there?', The stakeholders plead ignorance. They ignored fundamental elements necessary for the success of the product. In particular, they did not know that they had to know what they had to know (!). ('I didn't know I needed to know that ...')
The stakeholders do not listen to each other and do not maintain a dialogue. Everyone talks about their needs without listening to others. They avoid dealing with the issues raised by the other party.
Teams are constantly trying to reinvent the wheel instead of using proven solutions. The catch is that instead of benefiting from each other's experience, it imposes a learning curve on everyone in order to get up to speed before embarking on product development.
Rapid prototyping also brings its share of problems. By presenting a prototype that 'works', especially to non-experts, you get too much trust too early in the development process.

an organizational anti-pattern leading to failures

A high turnover rate within an organization is problematic.

In such an organization, there is no experienced person who knows the history of the organization's projects. According to Robert States, it is essential that these experienced people are fully included in the development of projects in order to impart 'tribal knowledge' to new members of the organization.

conclusion: should we apply these tips to software development?

Can we really apply these tips to software development? In an ideal world, software is a fully malleable product requiring minimal planning. This is true if you have the time, money and energy to start a project regularly from scratch. For example, the SocraticDev blog you are reading now relies on a software solution: custom code on top of the GatsbyJs framework. A GraphQL resource file management system. Surprisingly, the code hasn't changed much for two years. Even if it's 'just' code, the fact remains that it would be a significant effort to have to reopen the code regularly.

So taking the time to design a software application correctly from the start results in increased reliability and a product that delivers on its promises at a lower cost.

sources

https://teampipeline.us/being-an-engineer-podcast/

https://www.indiewire.com/2012/03/being-winston-wolfe-9-reasons-why-pulp-fiction-is-the-management-guide-every-indie-filmmaker-needs-48445/

why the software industry needs developer advocacy?

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Software is driving every aspects of the economy. At the bottom of the industry are the software developers. Developers are software artisans. That's great and not so great at the same time. Not so great because they are often victims of pressure and friction from colleagues and the business they are serving.

At an online lunch & learn organized by Parasoft, three experienced software specialists discussed topics such as developer advocacy, focus on security and DORA metrics. The title of the webinar was 'Why Developer Advocacy is the Key to Transforming Your DevOps Environment'

Developer advocacy is a movement led by techleads and enlightened managers. They hold the belief that great software is only possible when developers are properly valued by the business. Developers advocacy is about:

psychological safety
continuous education on the job
mindful onboarding of new developers
inclusion in the shared vision of the products developed

non negotiable business needs

All businesses who bet on software need speed of execution and quality software. Their main goal is getting to market the fastest. Are they really gonna attain this target by managing projects with deadlines and putting pressure on developers? Tracy Bannon (MITRE), Bryan Finster (Defense Unicorns), and Kevin E. Greene (Parasoft) are against this.

For Bryan Finster "you get speed if you do it the right way". He highlights DORA's deployment frequency as often being wrongly taken as a metric of speed. For him, speed is the outcome of a healthy process. For example, excellence in deployment frequency is not about coding faster but in deploying smaller batches of code frequently.

Tracy Bannon notes that deployment frequency is not a silver bullet. Certain domains like governement's agencies, embedded softwares and aeronautics would not benefit from multiple daily deployment to production. Instead of deploying once every 2 years, being able to deploy every 6 months would be a great improvement in those fields.

She also stresses that a key to healthy development flow is a fast feedback loop : fail fast - fail cheap. For example, developing software for a fighter jet like the F-35 can require deploying to a simulator and making those deployments count as deployment to production.

build product teams not project teams

Tracy Bannon recalls a famous saying in the contracting world : code, load and hit the road. Unfortunately developing software as a project promotes developers' disengagement. They are being pressured to deliver a list of features and once it's done, they are moving on to a different project.

Healthy software products cannot get built as a project. Unfortunately large organizations and governement's agencies ways of solliciting bids on contracts encourage such software failures.

Consulting firms should promote developer advocacy by educating their clients about the fondamentals of good software.

Good software is built by teams with a shared vision. Developers who care about the product. Developers who care about the end users.

promoting developers' education

Bryan Finster bluntly states that "colleges and bootcamps do not output good developers". Hiring junior developers entail the need to educate them to fullfill the business needs. Tracy Bannon talks about a recalibration of their skills. She uses the term 'influence forward' by putting forward the need, for the software industry, to go to colleges to discuss about what skills are needed for future developers. She underlines that some large tech organization had already form bonds with certain institutions. But such initiatives are still scarce.

According to the panel, developers are not deliberate enough about their purpose and their careers. They often use their own free time to level up their skills. With no long term target in mind.

Bryan Finster declares that it is not acceptable for developers to have to learn about software quality or software security as a side project. The best developers spend their own time to better themselves ; in a non formal way of learning.

In job interviews, when asked how they stay current and improve in technology most developers talk about personal projects and learnings done on their own time ; not during work hours.

Until developers are considered code monkeys we will need developer advocacy to improve the software industry.

sources

https://www.parasoft.com/webinar/why-developer-advocacy-is-the-key-to-transforming-your-devops-environment/

simple project: automate the encryption of backup files

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMT

A good file backup strategy is to keep a copy of the files on a different physical medium than the original as well as a copy of the same files in another physical location. An excellent option for undertaking your backups at a different location is to send them to the cloud. We can often use a free option with the big players Google, Microsoft or Dropbox.

However, we must be careful and consider the fate of these files entrusted to a foreign infrastructure. Are we comfortable that our files are made available to hackers in the event of a security breach? Or, a little less serious, are we comfortable with these tech goliaths exploiting the content of our files?

My answer is no. And the solution I propose is to store only encrypted files on the public cloud. That is, on servers made available and managed by someone other than yourself.

Manual process under `linux`

In linux, the process is very simple. In less than 3 command lines, the contents of a directory are encrypted using the GPG - GNU Privacy Guard library. However, the backup process should be performed regularly and consistently. The best option is automation. Automating will prevent us from making errors and above all will prevent us from laziness neglecting these maneuvers which will save our lives in the event of a hardware failure or ransomware attack.

Automate using `bash` scripts

In terms of automation, the most economical way is to script commands executed manually on a terminal.

Scripting is often a temporary and intermediate step. Before arriving at a robust and professional solution, we get our toes wet by quickly producing reusable scripts.

For example, in the time of a night, I coded two bash scripts to meet my need. A first script to encrypt a directory. A second script to decrypt the encrypted file. With these two scripts I am able to save time in the backup process. And above all, it motivates me to stay disciplined and regularly backup my files.

These scripts are available and ready to be used: [https://github.com/socraticDevBlog/encrypted-backupsialis(https://github.com/socraticDevBlog/encrypted-backups)

The encrypt.sh file compresses the contents of a directory; that is, it reduces it to a compressed file. Then, it uses the GPG library to encrypt it. GPG needs a passphrase for its symmetric encryption algorithm. So our script hands over to this library which opens a modal window and asks the user to enter a 'password' phrase.

We will use this same password to decrypt our directory.

# compress given directory to a custom named archive
archive_filename=${archive}-$(date +"%Y-%m-%d").tar.gz
tar -zcvf ${archive_filename} ${dir_path}/*

# encrypt archived file
gpg --output ${archive_filename}.gpg --symmetric $archive_filename

# remove temporary compressed directory
rm ${archive_filename}

The decrypt.sh file is used to decrypt the encrypted directory. It simply performs the reverse actions of the encryption process. In the end, we will find the original directory containing all the original files!

# decrypt file to compressed archive
gpg --output $archive_file_name --decrypt ${1}

# decompress archive to original folder
tar xzvf ${archive_file_name}

# remove compressed archive
rm ${archive_file_name}

Conclusion

Thanks to these two scripts I feel armed to implement a healthy strategy of backing up personal files to the public cloud.

However, I plan to modify these scripts and possibly automate the backup process from A to Z. That is to say schedule a regular process (daily or weekly) which will take care of sending a set of backups to the cloud. This will give me peace of mind: in the event of a technical problem or a ransomware attack, I will be able to recover my essential data in no time.

If you are tempted to use a strategy similar to mine, I would love to hear about it. Never hesitate to contact me via Twitter or LinkedIn to start a tech talk!

Translation by Google translate

Buck stops here : being intentional at software development

Thu, 17 Jun 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Professional software developers occupy a paradoxical position on the totem pole. We are both at the top ... and more often at the bottom. We are at the top because we are ones who add value to software by adding features or fixing issues. We are at the bottom because shit flows downhill. An array of non-technical specialists hover around software but, at the end of the day, coders are the one who implement and maintain their designs.

Professional software developers can't pass the buck. We either implement or design a workaround.

Being intentional

To me, the greatest quality a software developer can have is being intentional about his work. 'Being intentional' means 'doing things on purpose'. It entails knowing with clarity the goals one wants to achieve or the issues one wants fixed. Knowing our targets almost always lead us to discover the steps and assess the effort needed to attain them.

Being intentional means working with a clear mind, having a plan, and being able to measure progress. Finally, it means knowing when we're done. When we have fullfilled the objectives of a task it means we are done.

Opposite of being intentional

Don't get me wrong, not being intentional is our default setting. Mine included. Our natural laziness and arrogance trick us into thinking we can coast our way into success. But we cannot.

Here are some manifestation of not being intentional :

multitasking : juggling various tasks at the same time. It gives us the feeling we are being productive but we really never get anything done.
debugging : instead of reading code, reading logs and using automated testing, debugging code is time consuming and very tiring to the mind.
trying to pass the buck : an intentional developer doesn't pass the buck. He knows that the buck must stop at his workstation. He either develops that feature, fixes that bug or ... die trying. The intentional developer thrives on problem solving. He can ask for guidance but he must do everything in his power to close that ticket.

Tips to be more intentional

Be deliberate with your use of time. Wake up early if you need to. Don't multitask. Say 'no' more than 'yes'. Become better at assessing effort and time.
Be extra clear on the results you want to attain. Try not to leave stuff half done. At the very least keep half done stuff on your local machine and never available to colleagues. When you are done celebrate.
Use your focus wisely. Our attention span is limited, our mind can get tired. Spend your focused mind only on tasks that are relevant to your goals. Refuse to spend energy on issues that are not beneficial to you or your team goals.
Be grateful and cultivate relationships with people who help you attain your goals. Software development is a team activity. Most of your goals are linked to other people's goals. Leverage these common goals. Working as a team might be slower than alone, but will lead you much further !

sources

Success Comes To Those Who Are Intentional - Leadership Advice From John C. Maxwell

https://lucemiconsulting.co.uk/be-intentional/

The missing step metaphor

Sat, 27 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

Imagine entering an unfamiliar house and immediately you notice that a step is missing from the main staircase. You worry out loud about the danger this represents. But the host silences you:

"Yeah ... We know it's not safe, but everyone in the house has gotten into the habit of taking a longer stride to avoid the hole. In fact: we've never had a problem ! You just have to be careful. "

The missing step metaphor conjures up a problematic situation tacitly accepted by a community instead of being corrected. The blog The Pervocracy is credited for its characterization in an article dealing with tolerance towards a known sexual predator in a community (in real life).

The metaphor is not limited to the silence and inaction of a community toward criminal acts. We can speak of the missing step in different contexts:

A friend has the habit of borrowing money without ever giving it back;
A colleague at work never completes the tasks entrusted to him;
Part of your computerized system relying on code that only one employee can understand and work on.

How to recognize this kind of situation?

This is a situation known to most of the group. When a new person joins, either they are surprised by the situation or an insider passes on the infamous information to them by suggesting they close their eyes.

The group is able to function normally because its members have developed a workaround for the problem.

Why is it a problem?

This is the tragic question of truth and justice. It would take more energy and courage to face the problem than to tolerate the status quo. However, this is a lie that takes its toll. Instead of blaming the negligence and laziness of the owners of the missing house, the community is led to blame the person who could not avoid the hole. The victim becomes the culprit.

Absurd and tragic. No?

Translated by Google translate

sources

http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2012/06/missing-stair.html

Keep your data in your own personal cloud

Sat, 13 Feb 2021 00:00:00 GMT

If you have a large volume of data or if you require a certain level of security for your documents, the use of a NAS (network attached storage) could meet your needs. Hosting a large volume of data in the cloud is expensive. Storing unencrypted documents in the public cloud is risky.

How can you be sure your data are safe on a public cloud service?

Local area network storage is essential for businesses and large organizations. In order to streamline work, we store and make available any document essential to the proper functioning of business. Most of the time, this storage comes in the form of an additional drive available on your PC when you are connected to the internal company network. Users usually maintain a rigorous order there, system administrators manage the various read and write permissions, and an automated system performs a regular backup of all data.

why have a `NAS` at home?

Different needs motivate the use of a NAS at home. Many movie collectors a NAS to store their collection and other digital content. By adding a RAID redundancy system, they ensure protection against defective hard disks.

Me? I use a NAS because it offers a centralized source of data. Since I am working from multiple computers, file duplication had become problematic. Thanks to the NAS, I can access the same file through any device connected to the local network.

weigh the pros and cons

against :

It is easier to centralize your data by using disk space in the public cloud such as dropbox or Google drive;
Local area storage does not work well for those who work on the road or outside the home;
A NAS requires additional administration efforts: update, backup, etc.

for :

Getting a large storage space at low cost;
Managing and safe-keeping your personal data yourself;
Encrypting all your personal data (strongly suggested);
Data transfer rates on a local network are around 100 mb / s, there is almost no difference between loading a file located on your PC than the same live file on the NAS;
Reducing your ecological footprint: a small NAS running under Linux consumes almost no electricity.

strategy for keeping your data

Keep all your files on the NAS. Do not keep copies on different workstations;
Classify and keep your files in order;
Make regular backups: any valuable file should exist in 3 copies. A current version on your NAS, a copy in a backup stored on another machine. A third copy, encrypted, stored in the public cloud (or on a hard drive located elsewhere than your home);
Encrypt the entire hard drive. Modern NAS are powerful enough to encrypt and decrypt your data on the fly without losing performance.

conclusion

Using a NAS is not a magic cure but a valuable tool to make your digital life easier. Installing and administering such a system will take time, but will prove beneficial.

Give it a try!

Achieving by non-doing

Fri, 11 Dec 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Against a commonly accepted ideology imposing self-actualisation and perpetual state of hustling as moral values, lays a calm principle layed upon a complete metaphysical system of the world.

Taoism states that non doing (Wu wei) is a fundamental principle of government and self-government.

Taoism is a philosophical tradition based on the writings of Chinese philosopher Laozi (4th century B.C.). The renowned book Tao te Ching is described as the "book of the way and virtue". It proposes a metaphysical explanation of the origin of the world. An explanation of the principles ruling the world. Its teachings are aimed at the sage and the enlightened ruler. Against our commonly accepted values, it describes the best way to be effective : by doing as little as possible.

Tao Te Ching – Verse 60

"Governing a large country

is like frying a small fish. You spoil it with too much poking. Center your country in the Tao and evil will have no power. Not that it isn’t there, but you’ll be able to step out of its way.

Give evil nothing to oppose

and it will disappear by itself."

sources

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Wu_wei

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Han-Feizi

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Taoism

https://www.harinam.com/tao-te-ching-verse-60-governing-a-large-country-is-like-frying-a-small-fish-you-spoil-it-with-too-much-poking/

never cross the Bridge of Sighs unless you are truly indispensable

Sun, 11 Oct 2020 00:00:00 GMT

In the Italy of Renaissance, small northern city-states were in a constant state of war with each other. These cities were commercially prosperous but lacked proper military resources. Thus they outsourced military duties to outside contractors; to mercenaries known as Condotierre.

Francesco Bussone, Count of Carmagnola (1382 – 5 May 1432), was a famous and successful condotierre for the Visconti family (Duchy of Milan). When given reins of an army, he quickly subdued Bergamo, Brescia, Parma, Genoa and other cites. Concerned by his ambitions, the Viscontis removed him from military duties and gave him the position of governor of Genoa. Discontent with the way he was treated by the Viscontis, Count Carmagnola befriended Francesco Foscari, the new Doge of Venice in 1425. Venice feared the ambitions of the Viscontis and wanted to wage a quick and decisive offensive on Milan with the help of the Florentians.

But while the republic (of Venice) was desirous of rapid and conclusive operations, it was to the interest of Carmagnola, as indeed to all other soldiers of fortune, to make the operations last as long as possible, to avoid decisive operations, and to liberate all prisoners quickly. Consequently, the campaign dragged on interminably, some battles were won and others lost, truces and peace treaties were made only to be broken, and no definite result was achieved.

Admired and love by all, in 1442, Count Carmagnola was invited to dine with the Doge at the Doge palace. Once in Venice, the guards led the way. But having crossed the Bridge of Sighs, he realized they were not taking him to the palace but to the dungeon. He was condemned to death on charges of treason against the republic and beheaded the next day on the Piazza San Marco to the amazement of the crowd, surprised by such a sudden change of fate.

A man of ability, his great mistake was that he failed to see that he could not do with a solvent and strong government what he could with bankrupt tyrants without military resources, and that the astute Visconti meant to ruin him for his abandonment.

"He had taken his power for granted without making sure he was truly indispensable."

sources

Robert Greene (1998), "The 48 Laws of power"

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Francesco_Bussone_da_Carmagnola

Gift Culture might be your way out

Sat, 12 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Gift Culture, also known as Gift Economy, is a social exchange system adopted by some human societies when resources are in abundance. In societes where everyone's needs are taken care off, anthropologists have seen this curious phenomenon where the act of giving away ones own wealth makes him richer and elevates his social status. In aboriginal cultures, in mild climates where food is abundant, they have witnessed gift culture happening. On America's West Coast, there is potlach ceremonies where tribal leaders massively distribute gifts to their community. This culture of generosity is also present in show business and among the really wealthy.

In gift culture, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.

What about us developers of the 21st century ?

Open-source software is based on a gift economy. Skilled programmers can easily find good paying jobs, computer and hardware is available and not very expensive. Somewhat, developers live in a contexte of abundance. In their free time, their noble goal is to craft something useful and share it freely with the community. If you give away good code or help people out : you will enrich the community and gain status. The ones directly helped may not immediately give something back to you. But when they become able to help you, they will. Or if strangers hear that you're a kind programmer and contribute to the community : they might invite you to do cool work with them and take care good care of you.

On the other hand, if all you do is being mean and trying to be clever : no one will want to help you.

Today the professions where you can make the most money aren't the ones that are contributing the most to society. You can make a lot of money by doing terrible things. And for the things we need the most : they're aren't much money in them. -- Charles Eisenstein

Gift Culture's objective is fostering "a system of ties and obligations". While the money economy is fostering the relationship between things being traded, the gift economy fosters the relationships between the people doing the trading.

sources

The Hacker Milieu as Gift Culture

Potlach 1

Potlach 2

Charles Eisenstein: 'In a gift economy the more you give, the richer you are'

What is a gift economy? - Alex Gendler

Annual Report filing for SocraticDev's blog

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Current SocraticDev blog's website went live a little less than a year ago: on October 17, 2019. The blog previously benefited from free hosting on the wordpress.com platform. Despite the ease of putting a site online and adding content to it, I wanted absolute control over my content. As a programmer, you just have to take care of building and putting your personal blog online. Fun fact : the creation of a personal blog site is non-ironically the basic project for all JavaScript frameworks available on the market 😉

“If you love writing or making music or blogging or any sort of performing art, then do it. Do it with everything you’ve got. Just don’t plan on using it as a shortcut to making a living."

-- Seth Godin

Benefits of taking control of your personal blog:

be the owner of your content;
do not bore your readers with ads;
master a new way of programming
- a static website open to the general public is very different from a web application connected to a database
- learn to submit with humility to a JavaScript framework, use its modules, write MarkDown files, read the documentation and ... Everything will be allright
better understand how the web works:
- purchase and management of domain names and DNS;
- use of a TLS security certificate
- use of a continuous deployment pipeline (CI/CD)
- choose to host your site on a `` CDN '' because it's really better 🌎
- use of metrics to determine how to add value to your website:
  - Google Analytics to know the origin of its readers, the time spent on each page, if they return to visit the site, etc.
  - PageSpeed Insights to measure the performance of websites as well as follow the suggestions offered to improve the loading speed and the user experience

Some features implemented and bugs fixed

The SocraticDev blog website is powered by the GatsbyJS framework. As a proud programmer, I did not use the included boilerplate project for the blog's creation. Instead, I followed an online tutorial where a seasoned developer guides us to making a high-performance and well-designed site.

This developer-educator had the good idea to suggest the using tags containing posts' topics. This makes it possible to list, in an independent page, the different subjects treated. Then, the user can click on a topic of interest and view a list of posts related to that topic. The only catch was that I wanted to see the list of topics in descending order of incidence. For example, I wanted to see the "Technology" badge at the top because most of the posts are about tech, while the subject "Interview" should stay at the bottom because I have only conducted one interview to date. To do this, I had to create a small custom sort function ... which uses the BubbleSort algorithm 😎 Because it works!

This summer, by updating my dependencies with npm, the internal hyperlinks to the site simply stopped working. With the help of Bernie and Google I quickly found the solution to the problem. The moral of the story: when using lots of external libraries, by keeping them up to date, it is easy to quickly remedy breaking changes.

What does the future hold for us?

On the GitHub kanban, issues were created for the future: a toggleable dark mode allowing my insomniac readers to pamper their precious eyes. I anticipate the need to rework the pagination of the tickets because the visual is not pretty on mobile ... On the technical side, it is possible that I completely redesign the site in order to have fun with another technology.

I would like to conduct more interviews. I believe that talking to people with different experiences in the trade helps us better understand our field as well as make connections with our own experiences. The interview with ptdel allowed me to get to know this American developer better. We still keep in touch to this day.

Regarding projects, the acquisition of a vps server motivates me to develop new projects and experiment at will. From this server I use the domain dailybuild.org as a showcase for the #dailybuild programming community. I play a lot with small projects such as daily cron jobs running to visit job sites and save relevant offers to me.

Otherwise here is a list of topics I would like to cover:

Lexicon: an influential branding firm that comes up with cool names for your products;
is jQuery really dead ?;
the concept of geo fencing;
Concurrency, threading and parallelism;
Domain Specific Languages;
Graph API;
Is there really a 'FullStack' developer ?;
Digital Forensics.

Thanks

I first want to thank snipcart for setting up monthly meetups to talk about the JamStack and help Quebec City's devs to tame this technology.

MrRoach did a great job improving the original logo that I had produced through Fiverr. I love working with SVG files 🎉

I also thank the readers. Especially those who take the time to write me a note. You have no idea how much more it is appreciated than figures from the Google Analytics app!

Translated from french by Google Translate

What is SaltStack

Sun, 16 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

SaltStack is a high-speed platform for provisioning and controlling distributed computing resources. Salt Cloud is a configuration management tool that allows users to provision systems on cloud hosts or hypervisors. During installation, Salt Cloud installs Salt on all provisioned systems by default. This enables the user to put systems into the desired state during provisioning.

Salt was released in November 2011 and LinkedIn dev teams were the first major early adopter.

Salt is a configuration management engine to provide idempotent application of machine states to those hosts.

I became aware of Salt via The Hacks: a nerdy podcast hosted by Salt's founder Thomas Hatch and Jimmy Chonga, a tech newbie and former morning radio host.

Being a software and fullstack web dev, I've asked a devops pro about Salt and he told be it's 'based'. He had experience with it by helping an organization setup their infrastructure and he was pleased with the product.

SaltStack makes software for complex systems management at scale. SaltStack is the company that created and maintains the Salt Open project and develops and sells SaltStack Enterprise software, services and support. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds.

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management built on a dynamic communication bus. Salt can be used for data-driven orchestration, remote execution for any infrastructure, configuration management for any app stack, and much more.

Salt viable alternatives are Chef, Puppet, and Ansible.

However, adopters usually become die-hard fans of the product. One CTO stresses Salt was the best product to manage his large scale Windows Server based infrastructure. Easy maintenance is guaranteed mainly thru "a good reporting mechanism that allows one to easily view all operations".

When compared to competitors, Salt is the way to go if scalability and resilience is the most important concern for your organization.

sources

https://github.com/saltstack/salt

Chef vs Puppet vs Ansible vs Saltstack | Configuration Management Tools | DevOps Tools | Simplilearn

Configure and Use Salt Cloud and Cloud Maps to Provision Systems

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Salt_(software)

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Infrastructure_as_code

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/ZeroMQ

Expect: automation and semi-automation of processes under Linux

Fri, 07 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Expect is a TCL based utility which excels in automating interactive tasks.

Expect is a program that "talks" to other interactive programs according to a script. Following the script, Expect knows what can be expected from a program and what the correct response should be. An interpreted language provides branching and high-level control structures to direct the dialogue. In addition, the user can take control and interact directly when desired, afterward returning control to the script.

-- man page for Expect

This short script below (** strongly discouraged **) automatically provides your root password when requested by the system. This example illustrates the interactive aspect of automation with Expect. The script starts, performs certain actions, and returns control to the user.

expect -c '
spawn bash
sleep 0.3
send -- "sudo ls\n"
expect "password for"
send -- "<Your Password>\n"
interact
exit
'

Some use cases

Expect was used, in the time of telephone modem connections, for the server to call users and, thus, avoid charges for the call;
Reliability and sustainability: it is used as an automated testing tool by critical components of GNU/Linux such as gcc and LLVM. It is therefore worth the cost of investing time and effort to learn how to use it well and integrate it into your workflow;
Executing tasks usually performed by humans as they involve periods of inactivity, cursor movement, etc;
Automatically triggering completion with TAB and then hand over to the user;
Automatically invoking keyboard shortcuts in bash;
Interacting naturally with programs like a human would;
Filling in the gaps of a program where it would lack ways to interact programmatically with it, but on the other hand allowing a human user to do it manually;
Partial automation: performing certain operations and then handing over to a human user.

Why isn't `Expect` better known?

It is a very ecclectic application. First of all, its name, Expect, is really not great in terms of SEO. Rather difficult to look for help in Google by using this keyword;
Then, it's an interpreter who doesn't really have his own language. Expect uses TCL while adding extensions to it. Thus, it is sometimes difficult to determine if we are dealing with vanilla TCL or a peculiarity of Expect;
Despite its weak presence on the web, by reading the documentation related to TCL, we discover a universe of unsuspected possibilities to benifit from your UNIX or GNU/Linux systems.

Sources

Don Libes' Expect: A Surprisingly Underappreciated Unix Automation Tool

https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Expect

Massively renaming files

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Command-line tool mmv moves (or copies, appends, or links, as specified) each source file matching a from pattern to the target name specified by the to pattern. This multiple action is performed safely, i.e. without any unexpected deletion of files due to collisions of target names with existing filenames or with other target names. Furthermore, before doing anything, mmv attempts to detect any errors that would result from the entire set of actions specified and gives the user the choice of either proceeding by avoiding the offending parts or aborting.

Use case: renaming dozens of files manually is long and inhuman

It is not every day that you feel the need to rename files massively. However, in a rapid development process, standardizing the name of generated files is not top priority. For example, as part of my current project, I developed a light script to download and time stamp web pages on a daily basis: https://github.com/socraticDevBlog/webpage-grabber. During development, I improved the file names' syntax. As a result, the names of the files downloaded at the start of the project differ from the most recent.

The second phase of the project will be to scrape (web scraping) the content of downloaded web pages to extract the content and insert it into a database. For the web scraping application to be able to drink from a given directory, the names of the files must be standardized there. As the process of processing the data acquired will be automated, all the files must be named consistently.

Initially, I thought that there would be no problem to rename these files. I proposed to use the native commands of linux like mv and grep. However, these commands apply to one file at a time (unless you script bash or perl loops). By searching a little, I found the mmv tool and following the instructions, I quickly standardize all my files to be processed.

# apt-get install mmv

$ man mmv

The first command installs mmv on your server (Debian, Ubuntu, and some other distros). The second displays the tool's instruction manual in terminal.

Good success !

Sources

mmv (1) - Linux Man Pages

Write code now then ask for forgiveness

Sat, 06 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Programming in Python requires us to modify our conception of good programming practices. In enterprise-grade softwares, we aim for application stability and robustness. While the context where we favor the Python language is different. Python is perfectly suited for proofs of concept, automating processes through scripting, etc. In short, when coding in Python, we tend to go fast in order to get immediate results. Some companies boost their development potential by taking advantage of the flexibility of the language invented by Guido van Rossum. This allows them to quickly arrive at an MVP (minimally viable product). When the project has proven itself, then we recode everything in a enterprise-grade programming language such as C++, C# or Java.

Python is a popular programming language in education. Being a high-level language, you don't get lost in low-level technical details such as explicit typing or memory space management. For example, memory management is automatically taken care of by a garbage collector and the variables are dynamically typed. That is, a variable takes the type of the value that is initially assigned to it.

my_duck = Duck() is an object of class Duck

my_duck = 'Palmipede bird (anatidae), with broad beak, long and pointed wings.' is a variable of type string

'Duck Typing' in Python

Python, like JavaScript, is not a compiled language. In general, the compilation process allows us to detect different errors in the syntax of the code. In interpreted languages, we have to wait to run the code for errors to appear. For example, in a compiled language, at build, the compiler will immediately detect an error if we use the AmericanDuck class rather than the EuropeanDuck class. However, both implement a 'fly' method! The Python interpreter doesn't care about the type of a variable. As long as the 'fly' method can be executed: everything is OK.

"If I see a bird that flies like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck, then I call this bird a duck"

- James Whitcomb Riley

In the following case, we see that Python executes the code without worrying about the type of arguments passed in parameters to the calculate(a, b, c) function.

def calculate(a, b, c) => return (a+b)*c

a = calculate(1, 2, 3)
b = calculate('apples ', 'and oranges, ', 3)

print(a)
print(b)

9
"apples and oranges, apples and oranges, apples and oranges, "``

EAFP vs LBLY

The example above demonstrates how Python interprets the calculate function in two different ways. If the arguments are ìntegers, then it proceeds to an arithmetic operation. If the arguments are strings, then it does a string concatenation and a loop.

Generally, the programmer knows what he is doing and masters his code. When an error occurs, it is ... an exception! The good practice of Python is to avoid weighing down the code with preliminary validations. For example, we could verify that the arguments are indeed whole numbers. If we do a division, we will take the trouble to check that the divider is not zero, etc.

All these validations are not pythonesques. That is, they do not follow Python best practices. In Python, we want to go fast, we want an ultra simple and easy to read code. To do this, we adopt the EAFP principle: it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission ('Easier to ask forgiveness than permission'). Thus, the structure of the try except is prevalent in any pythonesque code base. We run the code freely and, when it breaks, we get and handle the exception.`

try:
x = my_dict["key"]
except KeyError:
manage_error('item doesn't exist')

Programmers have traditionally used to validate the arguments received as parameters before using them. It is also a good practice of the languages C# and Java! As far as possible, in enterprise software, we do not use Exceptions as decision structures ... We adopt a principle of prudence that Pythonians call: LBYL (' Look Before You Leap '). That is to say: look ahead before leaping.

The following example would rage a Pythonician because the code is a little more complex and less efficient: we look twice in the dictionary! However, this way of doing things respects the rules of the art in business.

if "key" in my_dict:
x = my_dict["key"]
else:
manage_error('item doesn't exist')

Translated from french by Google Translate

Source

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11360858/what-is-the-eafp-principle-in-python

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Python_(programming_language)

http://eikke.com/how-not-to-write-python-code/index.html

So you really want to open-source your project ?

Sun, 31 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The labels FOSS and F/OSS ('Free and Open-Source Software' and 'Free / Libre and Open-Source Software') describe a development model for open source software. According to a flexible legal license, everyone is allowed to execute, study and redistribute the source code. As well as provide extra features in order to sell it as product or service. This type of software differs from proprietary software whose source code is protected, more difficult to modify and whose use is chargeable.

The operating systems Windows, MacOs and Unix are an example of proprietary software. While the GNU/Linux distributions remain FOSS. This case illustrates the free software ecosystem well because some distributions (operating systems) GNU/Linux intended for large organizations are accompanied by restrictive licenses and require significant annual fees.

benefits

The costs of developing and using free software are much lower than for proprietary software. You don't have to pay for licenses to use them, and most of the time collaborators develop on a voluntary basis. Some organizations may provide 'after-sales service' to users. This business model ensures the sustainability of the project while saving time and worry for end users who need specialized assistance.

The absence of a patent promotes technological innovation. Open-source licenses are simple and not restrictive. This has the effect of providing effective protection to community members while ensuring that they are not held back by legal considerations.

More eyes, more security - Red Hat, Open Source specialist

Free software is often safer than proprietary software. The source code is accessible to all: it is scrutinized by a multitude of experts and quickly corrected when necessary.

The source code being available to everyone: it becomes eternal. Free software has an almost infinite lifespan. Even if the community abandons a project, the source code will remain available for the use and improvement of the software.

some challenges

All the same, the development of free software has its challenges. Any organization wishing to turn to open source must assess the value it will recover from this effort. Making a project available in open-source is a lot of work: before, during and after. And there is the risk that our community of contributors abandons the project is always present ...

The organization must first determine how this effort will pay off. Then it must determine how her project will contribute to the community. To attract talented contributors, it is imperative that the project be profitable for them. No developer will work voluntarily on a project which is indifferent to them!

The culture of free software promotes respect, openness and transparency. All development work must be done in an open and public way. The community must be in constant communication. The project accepts contributions from any member of the community. Any input, be it code or additions to the roadmap, must be received and diligently reviewed by project administrators. Any feedback should be given promptly and publicly.

These requirements are necessary for the acquisition and maintenance of the bond of trust between the community and the project put forward by the organization. Any decision taken privately or unilaterally will erode this bond of trust. An alienated community will therefore have the right to leave the project with the code and continue development independently.

the unavoidable

The quality of the code is the first challenge of a free software project. Any self-respecting project imposes non-negotiable standards regarding code quality. Any code that does not meet the requirements will be refused by the main contributors. We talk as much about naming variables and functions as about using spaces instead of a tab. Good projects, like Apache and Google, provide extensive documentation of its standards with explanations justifying their adoption. The best projects require a substantial coverage of the source code by automated unit tests in order to avoid regressions.

Four text files (.md) placed at the root of an open-source project are omnipresent in any free software project.

The LICENSE file contains the legal text setting out the rights and constraints of users of the source code. Most often, we will make a copy/paste of the text of the licenses commonly used like MIT or GNU.

The file named README.md explains the nature of the project. There is a description of the project. It explains how the project is useful to the community. And we inform employees of the resources available to answer their questions. The code repository website GitHub and GitLab even reads the MarkDown (.md) file and styles it to be displayed on the project's main page.

The file named CONTRIBUTING.md explains how to contribute to the project. It contains essential informations to frame the collaboration process. It explains the process to follow to create a new correction request. We suggest some features to implement in the short term. The product roadmap is listed there as well as the preferred (or prohibited) ways to communicate with the project managers.

For developers, we explain how to configure their development environment. We will even suggest an electronic template to use to submit a new feature or a fix via a pull request (or merge request in the GitLab ecosystem).

More and more projects contain a file CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md used to establish the social and ethical standards governing collaboration. It describes how we want participants to behave. We stress the importance of being warm and empathetic. In other words, treating others as we would like to be. Emphasis is placed on respecting the opinions, culture and life experiences of each. Recognizing that we are all fallible, we recommend taking the initiative to apologize when appropriate and, most importantly, to learn from these unpleasant experiences. Finally, we recommend prioritizing the good of the project and the community versus our personal ambitions and preferences.

As with legal license files, there is a 'Code of Conduct' document accepted by hundreds of projects that can be 'copy and paste' to the root of your project directory: Contributor Covenant: A Code of Conduct for Open Source Projects.

Translated from french by Google Translate

sources

https://redhatofficial.github.io/#!/main

https://opensource.com/article/17/6/what-know-you-open-source-your-project

https://portals.apache.org/development/code-standards.html

https://opensource.guide/starting-a-project/

Camus has already said a lot about the pandemic

Mon, 18 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The novel The Plague by Albert Camus was published in June 1947. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, many readers have obtained a copy of the book or have searched their libraries to reread it.

We follow the evolution of the plague in a city in French Algeria. It is especially the journey of Doctor Bernard Rieux that makes us penetrate into the spirit of this city which goes from denial, to anger, to negotiation and acceptance.

The narrator subtly presents philosophical themes and questions such as anxiety and the absurdity of human existence. Camus even offers a wink to friends with the death on stage of an actor performing Orpheus and Eurydice at the municipal opera house.

Cottard, a conscious man in the walled city

The only way to put people together is to send them the plague.

"There was, however, in the city a man who seemed neither exhausted nor discouraged, and who remained the living image of satisfaction. It was Cottard."

With that one (Tarrou), Cottard said to Rambert, we can chat because he is a man. We are always understood.

"Thus Cottard, and always according to Tarrou's interpretation, was justified in considering the symptoms of anguish and distress that our fellow citizens presented with this indulgent and understanding satisfaction which could be expressed by a: 'Speak always, I have had it before you '. "

You hear them, he told me: after the plague I will do this, after the plague I will do that ... And they do not even realize their benefits [...] They are unhappy because that they don't let go. And I know what I'm saying.

"[...] But because he felt all this before them, I believe that he cannot quite experience with them the cruelty of this uncertainty [...] But since he himself lived in terror, he finds it normal for others to know it in turn."

Translated from french by Google Translate

From 996 Working to ICU Waiting

Sun, 10 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A "996" work schedule refers to an unofficial work schedule (9a.m. ~ 9p.m., 6 days a week) that has been gaining in popularity in China. Serving a company that encourages the "996" work schedule usually means working for at least 60 hours a week.

Companies that changed the technological realm were startups without financial means

Any developer is above all a recycler: he uses existing technologies to create new ones. We are not reinventing the wheel. Besides, 'reinventing the wheel' is a deadly sin to a developer.

In the West, there are two ways: the proprietary software route and the free software route. Large organizations use almost exclusively proprietary software while start-ups with little financial means use almost exclusively free software.

996 culture slows free software development in China

Several political factors influence the technological sphere in China. The Grand Firewall of China is an apparatus which significantly limits Internet access to Chinese people. The Chinese do not drink like us from Google and Twitter but from clones in every way similar.

Chinese developers still have access to the same programming languages and libraries as we do ... as long as the documentation is available in their native language. For example, VueJS, a javascript framework created by Evan You, has a great success in China because its documentation was quickly translated into Chinese.

Why aren't there more Chinese learning English? This would allow them to have immediate access to the latest news. This would allow them to catch up. We might even hope to see them participate more actively in the world of free software. After all, most of the big Chinese companies do profit from the colossal amount of work of the contributors of the open source ...

996 culture effectively hampers the development of free software in China. Imagine having to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. Would you really want to start learning a foreign language? Would you really have the audacity to park yourself in front of a computer screen and fix other bugs during your sole day off?

Alienation through the cult of productivity

However, large Chinese entrepreneurs like Jack Ma of Alibaba exploit this 'ethical' conception of hard work in order to reap disproportionate profits at the expense of their skilled workforce. For Jack Ma, the 72-hour week is a blessing. The head of an e-commerce giant, Richard Liu, is afraid of losing his competitive advantage if his employees worked less: "Slackers are not my brothers!".

996 ICU: leveraging Github to develop a protest

In April 2019, the challenge from young Chinese developers moved to Github.com servers. Developers have opened a repository on the code-sharing site to protest against their working conditions.

The 'project' offers several revolutionary features:

It lists the companies imposing the 996 regime;
It displays the labor laws of China;
It describes an 'anti-996' license which would prevent the listed abusive companies from using your open-source project.

As of May 9, 2020, the project has received more than 249,000 stars in support.

Translated from french with Google Translate

Sources

The Rise of Open Source Communities in China (youtube video : 11min20sec)

What is "996"?

github 996.ICU

Jack Ma defends the 'blessing' of a 12-hour working day

Between the Wires: An interview with Vue.js creator Evan You

Having a sucessful side-project

Sun, 03 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The most successful personal projects are those whose main objective is to solve our own problems. It is impossible to lose by doing this. Because by solving our own problems, at least, we make our lives easier.

The world of technology is often struggling with the passive resistance of its players. They are often called 'trolls'. They are recognized by their words marked by doubts and negativity. When a programmer wants to venture into business, he often faces poorly informed reviews from these trolls.

Laravel web framework founder Taylor Otwell suggests not relying on these disengaged critics. He recalls that more than half of the comments read on the internet about his projects were negative: "There is no market for this product", "There is a better way to solve this problem", etc.

Otwell stresses that we cannot loose by developing a solution to the problems that make our lives difficult on a daily basis. Even if nobody would use our solution, we will have effectively solved our problems. However, it is very likely that thousands of people will experience the same problematic situations as we do.

For Otwell, it is a 'silent majority' of programmers who want to make their lives easier who have adopted its solutions. The fact remains that trolls populating tech sites like Reddit can be frustrating. In general, their opinions are to be taken lightly because they are not invested in the situation.

Sources

Advice for Tech Entrepreneurs | from Laravel founder Taylor Otwell (2min51sec)

honeypot.io

Not Without My Dutch Uncle

Sat, 04 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

In reading Randy Pausch's book "The Last Lecture", the reader accompanies a man spending his last months preparing to leave life.

Randy Pausch (1960-2008) was an American professor and human-machine interface and virtual worlds specialist. He is best known for his last lecture given on September 18, 2007. In a last effort to transmit his human experience, he relates episodes from his life and lessons received through many tribulations.

You were abandoned

The author revisits his childhood in order to take stock: did he fulfill his childhood dreams? One of his dreams was to become a professional footballer in the NFL. It was a failure. But he learned a lot from Coach Graham. This trainer who insisted on teaching the fundamentals of sport and who, above all, did not spare his proteges.

One day Coach Graham made Randy repeat maneuvers. Without success. Coach Graham therefore forced him to stay put after practice and do push-ups.

the assistant: "The Coach made your life difficult today, right?"

Randy: (weakly) "yes ..."

the assistant: "It's a good thing. When you mess around and no one says anything

that means they gave up on you. "

"This lesson has stayed with me all my life. When we find that we are acting like a jerk and no one bothering to point this out to us is a bad situation. You may not want to hear it, but those who criticize you are often those who love you and care about you and want you to get better."

The Dutch uncle

Human relationships are becoming increasingly artificial. Political correctness, false positivity and professional prudence too often prevent us from giving honest feedbacks. There is an English expression for someone giving honest feedback: 'a Dutch Uncle'.

I recognize myself in Randy Pausch who describes himself as someone with a well-hung tongue who do not hesitate to make your opinion known. Its research director at University Brown, Andy van Dam (a Dutchman!) Offered him this remark: "Randy, it's really a shame that people see you as arrogant because it's going to limit what you will be able to accomplish in life."

"The wording was perfect. He said to me 'Randy, you're acting like an asshole.' But in order to keep me open to criticism. [...] I like to think that my faults fall under the 'social' rather than 'moral' category. And I was fortunate to benefit from people like Andy who cared enough about me to tell me the things I needed to hear."

Randy Pausch passed away at home on July 25, 2008.

Source :

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40611510-the-last-lecture

https://www.wikiwand.com/fr/Randy_Pausch

Translated from french with Google Translate

Dark Patterns - Conned by Design

Sat, 28 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Dark Patterns are elements of the interface design intentionally designed to lure users to take unwanted actions benefiting the company in question. In other words, Dark Patterns are tricks exploited by websites and applications to manipulate us into doing unwanted things; like buying or signing up for something.

Harry Brignull is the designer who coined the term "Dark Patterns" in 2010. Recently, Harry has started providing expert witness services related to the dark patterns.

Most web users do not read the entire content of sites. We quickly scan the content and take action based on assumptions about the most plausible scenarios. By relying first on appearances we are sometimes lured by devious companies. Web designers sometimes take advantage of this to induce their users to perform unwanted actions.

These dubious schemes are practiced by several large websites like Amazon, LinkedIn and Ticketmaster. The non-commercial part of Amazon's website is recognized for its Kafkaesque complexity. For example, to deactivate its own account, a user must blindly navigate through several menus before finally having to chat online with an agent responsible for customer service. LinkedIn, by taking advantage of the location and color of certain buttons, was sneakily trying to acquire the user's contacts list in order to massively distribute its advertising by email. LinkedIn was also forced to pay damages over $13 millions to users deceived by this practice. Finally, Ticketmaster and LiveNation are said to be in the habit of subscribing unwary concert ticket buyers to magazines like RollingStone or Entertainnment Weekly by hiding a check box already checked on their purchase forms. Unfortunate because the only way to cancel the subscription would be to print a form, fill it out, pay a stamp and send it by post ...

Londoner Alexander Darlington, curator of the site darkpatterns.org, categorized and baptized these designed scams according to a certain air de famille:

Trick Questions;
Sneak into the basket;
Roach Motel;
Privacy Zuckering;
Price Comparison Prevention;
Misdirection;
Hidden Costs;
Bait and Switch;
Confirmshaming;
Disguised Ads;
Forced Continuity;
Friends Spam.

Dark Patterns are constantly evolving. New scams are daily developed and deployed. However, once informed of the fraudulent aspect of certain designs, the best counter-attack is to reveal them in the public space. Home-specialist Alexander Darlington suggests attacking offenders back by taking screenshots of a trap and tweeting it with the hashtag #darkpattern.

Good hunt !

References

https://www.darkpatterns.org/

https://youtu.be/kxkrdLI6e6M

https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/2/9444067/linkedin-email-lawsuit-settlement-add-connections

testimonium.co

https://twitter.com/alexanderdarlo

https://twitter.com/darkpatterns

https://90percentofeverything.com/about/

Q & A with a devops professional

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Patrick Thomas Delaney is an experienced full-stack developer with a focus on building cloud-native applications. His skills range from Python to C# ; from solution architecture to application design. He currently works with Ahead : a Chicago headquartered tech company dedicated to helping other companies build their digital business infrastructure.

Can you tell us about yourself : your academic background, your passions. Basically anything relevant to your current position/career. What led you to the cloud ?

(Patrick Thomas Delaney) I'll spare you a boring origin story but I will mention that The Matrix came out when I was an eleven year-old boy. That movie imparted into me the idea that computers are constant excitement, and that girls love hackers. This panned out to be entirely true, and my career has not been some kind of rude awakening to the contrary.

All devs have a story of failure. A meaningful event where they screwed up or missed on an opportunity. Usually, we learn from it and grow from it. Do you have a failure story you want to share ? How much did you learn from it ?

(Ptdel) While failures are endemic to development, I do have one instance I find myself laughing at in retrospect. One of my first ever billable tasks for a client resulted in me bringing down their entire website for fifteen hours over the weekend (their peak hours). The root cause was one single misplaced character in a yaml configuration file for salt. As chance had it, the client's monitoring provider also went down, and thus they were under the impression they were only ever down for one hour (a coincidence I was grateful for). While initially embarrassing, it was really just an affirmation that human error is always a factor, but one that can be mitigated with process and automation.

We hear ‘devops’ and ‘Agile’ are the solution to all problems in software development. At the same time, what I see around me in the organization of work are deeply segregated roles and ‘top to bottom’ (waterfall) requirements. Roles are divided between the programmer, a functional/business analyst, a QA/acceptance tester and the client. Databases and ops are the fiefdom of DBAs, data modelers, security analysts, sysadmins, etc. I’m asking a lot from you here, but how do you think devops and genuine Agile methodology can help the business ready to transition to a cloud infrastructure ?

(Ptdel) Developer hours are extremely inefficient in most large-scale traditional industry settings. A developer can write a single line of code, something which may only be part of some series, and find themselves needing to subject it to the entire "system" you describe in order to make progress. It could easily be the case that they are stuck in limbo waiting for a result for an entire week. While I'd like to say that's really bad I've actually seen far worse, like needing to schedule builds a month in advance.

I think I can best express the benefits of switching to agile methodology by referencing one of my former client : a financial company. They were on a semi-annual release schedule for major updates. These major updates didn't necessarily contain any new features, but were often just attempts to recover from technical debt. They took six months off in order to fully implement a comprehensive environment geared for agile development. Due to the fact that they chose to sacrifice a release cycle to change course, they now routinely publish more features and fixes in a single week, than they had for all years prior cumulatively.

What are the pitfalls you’ve witnessed about traditional businesses wanting to move to the cloud and devops. What are the usual issues they face ?

(Ptdel) For the benefit of everyone, business owners must be able to recognize when there is a genuine impetus to move to a hosted provider. It is extremely hard to justify moving to "the cloud" if a company retains all of its traditional practices centered around on-premise infrastructure.

I'm going to cop-out and not provide any specific technical pitfalls. Instead, I'll describe an encounter I frequently had during my time as a consultant. We would show up to a company, and there would be a single department in the company that was going to be the guinea pig. They didn't really have any clear-cut requirements, and many of the staff were still beholden to trivial day-to-day routine manual tasks. They would often see the appeal of moving to an agile methodology, only to come to the realization that their finance or security departments made any real attempts at change impossible. Half-way through the project another department would become aware of the endeavor, and seek to take the reigns in some fashion or to expand the scope of the project. By the time the contract had been used up, the scope of the engagement was completely unrecognizable from the original, and nothing had been completed to any satisfactory level.

This is all a roundabout way of saying there must be buy-in from everyone, and leadership must be the ones communicating this to everyone. If it's a pet project left all to its own, hopefully the funds behind it are fungible or the loss justifiable.

A lot of devs are mostly concerned with code and having features working in their dev environment. We don’t really know or care to know about delivery pipelines, automation, database security and performance, etc. Do you have suggestions to younger devs who wants to be relevant in 15 to 20 years from now ?

(Ptdel) Honestly with the state of things now I really have no idea what being relevant in fifteen or twenty years would even look like.

For those coming into the profession now, or maybe trying to progress themselves I would just say this: you're not special. For a long time developers have maintained some mystique around their profession, putting on the airs that what they do is uniquely challenging. While that might have been true at some point it's not the case anymore. If you don't learn about the environment your code lives in, and how to control all of it, I can assure you that somebody else with more motivation will, and their advantage will be significant.

Have a willingness to gain competency in new things with an understanding that it's for your own good. Last of all, drop any dogmatism or pretension you have around the way things ought to be in the real world and focus on delivering reliable results.

I would like to thank Patrick for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer my questions. Hopefully, I will post more Q and A in the future !

Wise quotes

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Under daily life noise there is a calm and pacific realm. The medecine professor Jon Kabat-Zinn puts forward the analogy of the storm at sea to illustrate the superficiality of most of our concerns. At sea level we fear the most violent storm, but a couple of dozen feet below : everything is calm and still. Defined as a quest to wisdom, philosophy wakes us up from the slumber of ignorance. It puts forward 'alarm clocks' whom, if we accept their authority, force us to realize the unsoundness of our noisy opinions.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool - Richard Feynman, physics Nobel prize 1965

You will never get into trouble by admitting that you may be wrong - Dale Carnegie, american author and public speaker

Vain men never hear anything but praise - Le Petit Prince

Most men seek less to be instructed, and even to be amused, than to be praised and applauded - Jean de la Bruyère, french philosopher

What you do speak so loudly I cannot hear what you say - Ralph Waldo Emerson, american philosopher and poet

The most important thing in communication is to hear what is not being said - Peter Druker, professeur et consultant américain en management d'entreprise

Tell you the secret to a good life : always be the oldest one in the room - Yvon Chouinard, founder of the Patagonia brand

[...] modern culture has been increasingly building blindness to the mysterious, the impenetrable, what Nietzsche called the Dionysian in life - Nassim Taleb, essayist, statistician and risk expert

Original humans were believed to be both male and female ; this made them so powerful that the gods feared them and split them in half - Susan Sontag, american essayist, novelist and militant

Is Arnold Jackson a bad man who does good things or a good man who does bad things ? It's a difficult question to answer. Perhaps we make too much of the difference between one man and another. Perhaps the best of us are sinners and the worst of us are saints. Who knows ? Somerset Maugham, british novelist

People hate to have their minds changed - Jeff Atwood, developer and cofonder of Stack Overflow website

Never ask permission to do your job correctly - Doc Norton, speaker, coach and consultant in software delivery

People who suffer the most from a given state of affairs are paradoxically the least likely to question, challenge, reject, or change it - John Jost, american social psychologist

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other - Eric Hoffer, american philosopher and psychologist

Non nobis solum nati sumus (we are not born for ourselves alone) - Cicero, roman antiquity philosopher

Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth - Mohamed Ali, american professional boxer

Three kinds of Men

Sat, 14 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

In the software world, we are sometimes trading cybersecurity, clean architecture and just basic good practice concerns to convenience. Sometimes rightly so …

But would you trade superior ideals like the quest of the good life for mere comfort and social status ?

What is Man ? What makes a Man worth its salt ?

Pythagoras was an early Greek philosopher, acquainted to the esoteric tradition transmitted to the Egyptians, expressed his anthropology thru this metaphor :

In this life, there are three kinds of men, just as there are three sorts of people who come to the Olympic Games. The lowest is made up of those who come to buy and sell, the next above are those who compete. Best of all, however, are those who come simply to look on. The greatest purification of all is, therefore, disinterested science, and it is the man who devotes himself to that, the true philosopher, who has most effectually released himself from the ‘wheel of birth’.

dark side of metrics

Sat, 16 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

It would be shortsighted to consider software development a sacred craft that should steer clear of financial pressures or business concerns. As a software developer I dedicate every worktime minute to increase the value of my employer’s services and products. If I stop doing that, he’ll have every right to severe his ties with me. In the same spirit, our clients and employers have to be diligent and assess our value by our contribution to the success of their enterprises. Easier said than done, eh !?

I’ve recently purchased Tom DeMarco’s book Why does software cost so much ? based on Joel Spolsky’s good review on his blog https://www.joelonsoftware.com/. Reading the second essay, ‘Mad about measurement’, forced me to take off my software developer’s hat for a while and reflect on the struggle of managing our byte-artisans community.

This essay reflects on the negative effects of metrics in software development. As a newcomer in the business, I entertain no opinion for or against software measurements. So, in this post, I will try to depict the author’s position by selecting some parts of his text. The full-length essay covers the subject in an deeper and more nuanced way. If you’re interested in the subject, I strongly suggest to get a copy of Tom DeMarco’s book :

Tom DeMarco, Why does software cost so much : and other puzzles of the information age, New York, Dorset House publishing, 1995, pp. 13-44.

Bio of the author:

‘Tom DeMarco (born August 20, 1940) is an American software engineer, author, and consultant on software engineering topics. He was an early developer of structured analysis in the 1970s.’ (Wikipedia, ‘Tom DeMarco’, date of last consultation : august 9th 2017)

The good stuff:

‘Metrics’ means different ways to measure how an organization or a project is doing. The author also talks about ‘software measurement’. Metrics may very well be what turns software development from a craft to a science :

‘Metrics could be defined as the discipline of counting things and observing and profiting from patterns found among the things we count.’ (page 15)

The author is ambivalent about metrics. On one hand, he’s a proponent of metrics notably by having published a book titled ‘Controlling software projects’ and offering his services as a software productivity consultant. On the other hand, he is critical about the multiplication of metrics and their negative influence on software developers and software companies.

“This may seem obvious, but somebody really ought to say it: Metrics cost a ton of money. It costs a lot to collect them badly and a lot more to collect them well” (page 14)

DeMarco’s position is that metrics are useful to learn new things. Hence, most measurements should be ad hoc and never collected permanently :

‘I can only think of one metric that is worth collecting now and forever: defect count […] There are many other metrics that are worth collecting for a while. Each time you introduce and begin collecting a new metric, you need to put in place a mechanism to cease collecting that metric at some time in the future. Many of the most useful metrics should be collected only on a sampling basis.’ (page 15)

The author underlines that a lot of metrics’ usage causes dysfunction. As an example, he evokes a nails factory in communist Russia. First, the metrics used by the government was the number of nails produced in a month. So, the factory switched to producing a lot of very small nails. These nails weren’t in demand, so the government changed the metrics to the tonnage of nails produced every month. As a matter of fact, the factory switched to produce bulky railroad spikes… This example shows that for every metric set, the people subjected to it will more or less quickly learn how to game it.

DeMarco categorizes metrics into a ‘spectrum’ according to its aim :

Behavior modification ———————– Steering —– ————————–Discovery

He maintains that the healthiest way to use metrics is at the far right of the spectrum. And the more we go to the left, the more probabilities that metrics will cause dysfunction.

Are some tech companies against measurement ?

‘Apple and Microsoft, to name just two companies that make no systematic use of software measurement […] have done just fine without it. […] The entire small-cap sector is not known for its measurements practices, yet the solid vitality of the American economy since 1980 has come almost entirely from these small companies.’ (page 18)

Dysfunction at Hitachi Software

The author uses an example of a metric being gamed by software developers to illustrate his point that using metrics as behavior modification :

Hitachi’s then Chief Scientist, Tomoo Matsubara, made the discovery that ‘early detected defects could be a positive indication of as-yet-undetected defects’. This discovery was specifically applied to unit testing: the number of early detected faults would predict the number of faults to expect in a soon to be shipped program. So, ‘consciously or unconsciously’, developers started to hold back on finding faults in unit tests ! ‘Holding back a defect benefits the individual developers in three ways: 1- They look good since their modules appear relatively defect free; 2- They have fewer latent defects ascribed to their code, hence less pressure later; 3- They have one or two defects ready to produce during integration testing when management clamors for more.’ As a conclusion : ‘Holding back on defects benefits the developer, but doesn’t benefit the organization at all. It is a clear example of dysfunction’ (pages 20-21).

Measurement Dysfunction: ‘compliance with the letter of a motivational scheme in such a way as to achieve exactly the opposite of that scheme’s underlying goals and intentions’ (page 24)

Cost/benefits : how to measure benefits ? do we even measure it ?

‘The cost/benefit study is concerned totally with cost and not at all with benefit. Benefits, if they are mentioned at all, are fuzzy : ‘The benefit is we gotta have it’ or ‘The benefit is better sales reporting’ or ‘The benefit is competitive advantage’. When benefits are not quantified, it seems almost pointless to me to quantify costs’ (pages 40-41)

‘The paradox at work here is that productivity is often at odds with benefit. Benefit is maximized by taking chances and venturing into new territory. Productivity is improved by familiarity and repetition’ (page 41)

‘Just as we have learned to make software projects cost-conscious and cost-accountable over the past decade, we now have to relearn how to make them benefit-conscious and benefit-accountable’ (page 42)

The author’s Commandments :

- Measure for benefit or don’t measure anything
- Measure for Discovery
- Be suspicious of any findings that confirms your darkest suspicions

(pages 43-44)

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