bookmark_borderFive for Friday – February 26, 2021

Just like that, it’s the last Friday of the month. One new thing this week is that I’m playing with a newsletter version of FfF for those who would like to see my links in their inbox instead of my blog site.

There’s a sign-up sheet here.

Now onto the links.

That’s it for this week – see you in March.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – February 19, 2021

Back again and sharing a few cool things I found this week.

Stay safe out there – thanks for reading (and clicking)

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – February 12, 2021

Another week whirled by – here’s some stuff I found worth sharing.

  • I polished off another fiction book last week – this time it was Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. It’s a quick and fun read – not 5-stars good, but definitely interesting enough to recommend.
  • Someone on the ABTesting slack pointed me to rephonic.com, and this very cool visualization showing the relationship of the AB Testing Podcast and other podcasts
  • If you were under a rock, you may have missed the hidden security challenges in package management – Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Dozens of Other Companies
  • I’m doing a virtual meetup for the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference next month – you can sign up here.
  • I don’t really get to write much code anymore, but I came across lite recently, and wow – it’s small and fast, and I like it.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – February 5, 2021

The light at the end of the tunnel is tiny…but it’s there. Here’s some stuff to share this week.

  • President Biden has promised 100M vaccinations in 100 days. The math isn’t hard to see that the end is still a long way off. I’ve been checking in on this vaccination tracker to see just how far we’ve come – and how far we have to go.
  • I’m currently reading Hidden in Plain Sight – which is turning out to be one of the most enlightening and educating books I’ve ever read.
  • In case you missed it, I moved the modern testing site off of the old wordpress site hosted here to its own …also wordpress site.
  • Deserted Island Devops (the conference hosted inside Animal Crossing) is accepting submissions
  • After almost 20 years of riding a Ducati, I upgraded to a 2020 Harley Davidson Forty Eight. Here’s a picture of mine.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – January 29, 2021

We all made it through another week. Here’s some stuff for you to check out.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – January 22, 2021

Here are a few of my favorite articles I found this week

See you next week.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – January 15, 2021

Welp – it’s been another one of those weeks. Here’s some stuff I found that helped me get by.

  • I’m still on a fiction break. This week, I read Ready Player Two – and it wasn’t bad. I definitely enjoyed the first book more, but this one was enjoyable and a good read (and I’m a sucker for all of the 80s pop culture references)
  • A lot of you may have heard me talk about how World of Warcraft and self-organizing teams are similar (I call it the World of Warcraft guide to Project Management). Here’s a recent post with a very similar (and more in depth) take.
  • Another great article talking about the rise of the chief of staff role.
  • This article on why we need data engineers and not data scientists is well-written, logical, and IMO about time someone wrote this.
  • This is the last FfF I’ll ever write during the presidency of the worst human being ever to hold the office. If you’re out of the loop, read this to see how fucked up things are in the U.S. right now.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – January 8, 2021

What a week to start off the year. Hopefully, it’s just leftover 2020 continuing to fester. Here’s some new stuff to talk about.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – December 11, 2020

I am taking the rest of the year off, so this the last FfF of 2020. Let’s hope 2021 goes just a little bit better.

  • There’s been a lot of lying with statistics in the news recently, so I was happy to see this article about the data literacy needed to better understand what’s going on with covid vaccine trials
  • I updated my Synology NAS this week – I pulled the drives out of my old unit, plugged them into the new unit, and I was up and running in minutes with all of my data intact.
  • Earlier in the pandemic, I played through Ori and the Will of the Wisps – I liked it so much that recently played through Ori and the Blind Forest, and I enjoyed it just as much.
  • This is a fascinating story of an almost engineering disaster
  • Worth mentioning that the Sounders are in the MLS cup again. Match is tomorrow – watch it.

bookmark_borderFive for Friday – December 4, 2020

The year keeps puttering along – here are a few things I found interesting this week.

  • I’ve been spending a lot of time recently learning about “FinOps” – the website has some information, but I’m finding a lot of interesting info as I scour the net (book reco coming next week. If you happen to be in this field, would love to talk.
  • I’m…not good with photo editing (but working on it). One easy thing that’s helped is remove.bg for automatic removal of image backgrounds. I wish I knew about it sooner.
  • I’ve been binging a bit on the Chaos Community video series. The episodes are quirky and informative.
  • I’m working on creating more opportunities for self-organizing teams within my org, and this article on reimagining the org chart gave me a lot to think about.
  • My leadership philosophy shifted the first time I read Lencioni when I realized that as a manager, my first team is my peer org. This article on first team has a great view on that concept.