Microblog

Here are some short form posts - enjoy!

Release It Book Club Preface Discussion on Kook Book Nook

I’ve been reading the book Release It, and I’ve started putting discussion questions on Kook Book Nook. The first few topics to discuss the book are already up. Come read with me! (Also remember there’s a 40% discount to buy the book at https://pragprog.com/ with discount code stevenoxley.)

Release It Book Club Relaunch

I’m relaunching the Release It! book club on Kook Book Nook (yes, the name is kooky on purpose), which is a Discourse forum I set up specifically for book clubs. I felt a forum would be a better format for the types of discussions I want to have with you about this book. Come join me and let’s learn from each other and have some fun along the way.

Click this link to get started.

Go to Gluten Free Bread

I’m not a food blogger. I’m not into baking. But now that I have been diagnosed with celiac disease, I have figured out how to make (actually good) gluten-free bread at home, and if you’re like me, you might want to save some money and do it, too. Here’s the recipe: https://www.stevenoxley.com/blog/2025/03/27/go-to-gluten-free-bread/.

Release It Book Club Chapter 3: Fault, Error, Failure

In Release It! chapter 3, Nygard makes distinctions between faults, errors, and failures:

Fault: “A condition that creates an incorrect internal state in your software.”
Error: “Visibly incorrect behavior.”
Failure: “An unresponsive system.”

“Triggering a fault opens the crack. Faults become errors, and errors provoke failures.. That’s how the cracks propagate.”

What do you think of these distinctions and this terminology for system failures?

#ReleaseItBookClub #ReleaseItBookClubChapter3

In the past, I have used these terms interchangeably. I suppose I mostly refer to errors. It may be handy to have more precise terms to describe these stages of failure.

Release It Book Club Chapter 3: Major Dangers to System Longevity

Nygard states that “the major dangers to your system’s longevity are memory leaks and data growth.” Can you think of other major dangers to system longevity?

#ReleaseItBookClub #ReleaseItBookClubChapter3

I have the advantage of reading ahead - there’s a whole chapter on stability antipatterns - but I think it’s interesting that this statement focuses on data issues. I suppose compute-related failures are more obvious and visible: if you accidentally wrote code that contains an infinite loop or is otherwise inefficient it will be more readily caught in testing.

Release It Book Club Chapter 3 Crack Propagation

In chapter 3 of Release It! Nygard refers to James R. Chiles’s “analogy between a complex system on the verge of failure and a steel plate with a microscopic crack in the metal. Under stress, that crack can begin to propagate faster…[until] the metal breaks explosively.”

In software systems, the equivalent of an explosive break and the “crack” that caused it is called a “failure mode.” Does this analogy and definition resonate with you?

Nudgsicle Authentication

Nudgsicle is coming along - slowly but surely. It’s amazing to me how much of a slog it is - even for someone like me who has integrated OAuth, OpenID Connect, etc. - to build authentication for an application. Even with services like Amazon Cognito.

Fun fact: did you know that “Sign in with Slack” and “Add to Slack” are two different things that shall not be combined?

Indie Hacker Failure Listicle

How to fail as an indie hacker: a listicle.

Never ship anything.

Release It Book Club Chapter 3: Impulse and Stress

Chapter 3 of Release It! has some interesting definitions that I hadn’t considered as deeply before. Nygard notes that the following two terms come from mechanical engineering.

Impulse is a “rapid shock to the system.”

Stress is “a force applied to the system over an extended period.”

What do you think of these terms? Have you felt the need to differentiate between these two types of load in your work?

Release It Book Club Chapter 2 Case Study

Chapter 2 of Release It! is a case study of an incident that occurred which brought down an airline’s entire check-in system. It took three hours to recover, and was caused by leaking connections from a database connection pool. Nygard’s conclusion from the case study is that perhaps this issue could have been caught with more testing, but even so it’s impossible to catch every such defect. And therefore you have to prepare your application to survive such issues. Do you see any problems with this conclusion?

Nudgsicle Development Environment

As part of my work on Nudgsicle, I’ve created a pretty neat development environment where I can work locally with a similar architecture to the production environment, which includes Lambda, an S3 website, etc. One of the main pieces that makes it work is a little AWS Lambda Function URL emulating dev server that I wrote. You can see the code in this gist. Let me know what you think!

Release It Book Club Chapter 1 Qa Team

Does your company have a traditional QA team? If so, what percentage of defects do you think they catch?

We don’t have a QA team at Seeq. In chapter 1 of Release It! Michael Nygard talks about how some engineers develop code for the QA team to verify rather than for the customer to use or to work well in production. I think that I have been guilty of that - especially some of the work I did at Groupon comes to mind. At Seeq, the bigger temptation is to write software for the support team to manage and keep running.

Release It Book Club Chapter 1 War Story

What’s the hairiest or most expensive production bug you’ve had to fix?

#ReleaseItBookClub #ReleaseItBookClubChapter1

Release It Book Club Loneliness

I think no one is reading this book with me. I miss you all. 🥹 You can just assume from now on the replies to these posts are me answering my own discussion questions 🤣. Or you can respond without reading the book. Maybe someone will pick it up sometime and follow the breadcrumbs.

#ReleaseItBookClub

Release It Book Preface Discussion 2

The preface of Release It! states, “If anybody has to go home for the day because your software stops working then this book is for you.” Do you work on something with that level of criticality? What do you work on that might be helped by the advice in this book?

#ReleaseItBookClubPreface #ReleaseItBookClub

Discuss on:

Release It Book Preface Discussion 1

What are you hoping to learn from Release It!? What are you hoping to get out of the book club?

#ReleaseItBookClubPreface #ReleaseItBookClub

I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book. Based on the title, I thought it would be about Continuous Delivery, deployment strategies, etc. Maybe it will touch on those topics, but it seems to be much more focused on the design of robust software in production. So now I am hoping that this book will help me espouse these principles of robustness in my own work and throughout my company. Similarly, for the book club I’m looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts and experiences on the content of the book to see how it could be applied in different contexts, and hopefully receive some inspiration for applying it in my context.

Release It Book Club Starts Next Week

#ReleaseItBookClub starts next week! You can obtain your copy (use discount code stevenoxley at pragprog.com) and start reading. I’ll start posting discussion questions next week using tag #ReleaseItBookClub and tag pattern #ReleaseItBookClubChapterN so you can read and discuss at your own pace. See you there!

Release It! Book Club Discount

I have news! You can use the discount code stevenoxley to get a 40% discount on Release It! Second Edition by Michael T. Nygard - making it that much easier to join the async book club that I’m starting here in February.

Release It! Async Book Club

I’m starting an async book club for the book Release It! Second Edition by Michael T. Nygard and you’re invited to join! You can sign up here to register your interest and (hopefully) get a discount on the book: https://forms.gle/kti3xFYD7cMjEBYk9. Or go ahead and buy the book now (I already have mine). I plan to start reading and posting discussion questions at the beginning of February. I’m looking forward to it, and feel free to spread the word - all are welcome!

Tea Advent Calendar

Behold, my tea advent calendar! I have some catching up to do.

Flexibility Progress Update 2

More hamstring flexibility progress! I’ve been able to touch my toes for weeks now, and last night I was able to touch the floor with my knees locked. I’ve never done that before 🙀

A before picture on the left trying to touch my toes and being about 5 inches away. An after picture on the right of me stretching and touching my toes!

Nudgsicle Preorders Available

Nudgsicle pre-orders are now available 😁 (also 🤣, also 🙏). https://www.nudgsicle.com/

Team Topologies Book Club: Chapter 1 Discussions

I love books. I love reading books about work. I especially love discussing books related to work with my colleagues, so I frequently run and participate in book clubs at work. I’m currently running a book club with the book Team Topologies by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais, and I thought I’d share the discussion questions I’m using for the book club. Here are the questions for chapter 1:

What are the takeaways you have from this chapter?
What ways have you seen our company’s org chart mismatch our communication structures?
What are examples you’ve seen of missing dynamic and sensing aspects of traditional organization design?
How are we doing with regard to the five rules of thumb for designing organizations?
1. Design when there is a compelling reason.
2. Develop options for deciding on a design.
3. Choose the right time to design.
4. Look for clues that things are out of alignment.
5. Stay alert to the future.
What are some examples you’ve seen of Conway’s law in action at our company?
What are some examples where teams at our company have had to deal with excessive cognitive load?

POSSE

I’ve been trying to practice POSSE - Post On (your own) Site Syndicate Everywhere (LinkedIn, X, and Mastodon for now). I’ve been using Zapier and Buffer to do this, and it honestly kinda sucks and will be expensive when my 7 day Zapier trial ends…

I could probably make it work how I want since Zapier is quite flexible, but in order to access multi-step Zaps (which would be necessary), I’d have to spend $20 / month. Not worth it.

Flexibility Progress Update 1

The hamstring stretching routine I’ve been doing is working! After only a couple days I saw major gains. Unfortunately, it seems like my hamstrings reset each day and I have to stretch them again to reflexify them. Also, I haven’t seen much absolute progress since the first couple days. I’ll keep at it!

Me stretching - still a few inches from touching my toes, but much closer!

2024-10-22T15:23:37-07:00

I set myself an audacious goal this year to try to launch product(s) that will make me $1M / year by the time I’m 40. That is not very far away at this point - 40 months from yesterday. I set the goal 4 months ago and I’ve launched…. nothing.

In order to accomplish the goal, I think I’ll have to launch lots of products until something sticks… My original goal was to launch one every two months. But I’ve been too focused on success!

2024-10-22T15:23:30-07:00

Tralina (my wife) and I give ourselves a “discretionary spending” budget that we can each spend however we want without consulting the other. I have taken $500 of my budget and put it in a bank account for my product launching side business project. It might be fun to track that investment money and see how it dwindles over time (or if I keep it in the black!). Current status: $466.79

Nudgsicle and pr-reminders

I’ve reached a major milestone with Nudgsicle - the product I’m working on to help with timely code review. Specifically, I and some colleagues released the core backend functionality that will power it as an open source project. More details here: https://nudgsicle.com/articles/announcing-pr-reminders-open-source.html

2024-10-20T09:02:15-07:00

I’ve always had issues with hamstring and lower black flexibility. Even as a kid I couldn’t touch my toes with my knees locked and performed poorly on that part of physical fitness tests. In my 30s it became a problem when I pulled both hamstrings one summer playing softball.

Since then, I’ve been better about regular stretching and flexibility exercises (I even got to where I could touch my toes with my knees locked once!) but I still have issues with injury now and then. For example, I did three cycling workouts last week, and yesterday I was literally just walking around and felt like my left hamstring was about to give out.

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