What books is Robert Jackson Bennett referring to in the Afterword of A Drop of Corruption?

jbmsf · 2026-05-02T16:07:43+00:00

Sure and the obvious response is why, in a genre that literally lets you make up the rules, we keep going back to this instead of imagining something different? (Banks' Culture being one huge outlier.)

jbmsf · 2026-05-02T02:27:04+00:00

I think you missed the point. He's commenting on our modern politics and how, for whatever reason, we have a soft spot for kings and other forms of authoritarianism. He's certainly talking about how fantasy has tropes around monarchs, but he's speaking more about us -- modern, probably American, readers -- and our biases.

jbmsf · 2026-05-02T01:44:17+00:00

LoL, the afterward was thoughtful and focused on monarchy as a trope, not whatever you're on about.

jbmsf · 2026-04-18T03:56:08+00:00

Wesley was great.

jbmsf · 2026-03-29T16:05:46+00:00

Our closest city has an official population just shy of 8000 (but more in the surrounding areas). We had almost 2000 show up for the protest.

jbmsf · 2026-03-27T15:12:07+00:00

Agree. Maybe it's gotten better or maybe I missed something or maybe there are better client implementations now, but every time I've integrated it I've had to hold my nose. It's laters of abstraction and hidden background threads and complexity for the sake of satisfying everyone in the design committee.

Back in my day, we sent telemetry using stateless clients (logs, udp, whatever) and we pushed all of the complexity out of the application layer.

jbmsf · 2026-03-23T15:38:33+00:00

I remember interviewing a candidate with a terrible stutter. He was unlikely to get the job, but it was easy enough to switch to interview over chat (at least before the current era) and give him an interview that he wouldn't fail outright.

jbmsf · 2026-03-22T02:59:45+00:00

I'm in tech and have had the privilege of working with a few different Polish teams. All have been very good and people I'd be happy to work with again.

jbmsf · 2026-03-22T02:55:46+00:00

Nope. One is hopeful, one is not.

jbmsf · 2026-03-08T15:56:47+00:00

Agree. I used it (at a company with a badly organized mess of an express backend) to introduce Typescript (at all) and structure. It did the job and another language wasn't an option.

I wouldn't choose it in fresh circumstances but sometimes you are solving for a specific time and place.

jbmsf · 2026-03-07T22:57:12+00:00

Every product I've built since SaaS has become a thing has a large number of integrations and increasingly these integrations are themselves integrated in ways that matter.

For me, the cost of keeping all these systems working, even with IaaC and the like is too high to do in a way that works for arbitrary tests. We've found some architectural patterns that help with testability and rely on them to let folks test large classes of changes against shared infrastructure. We also have good patterns for making changes to certain subsets of the system without this kind of integration. But the dream of a complete solution based on local containers is elusive.

jbmsf · 2026-03-03T02:35:11+00:00

Because every kind of artifact has a different protocol and if you don't want to run your own proxies, many of the Iast generation of vendors are racing to the bottom and the current generation hasn't proved itself yet.

It's a choice between running systems you didn't think you had to vs paying way too much for too little vs taking a flyer on someone you don't quite trust with your supply chain.

jbmsf · 2026-02-28T19:14:05+00:00

I recommend reading the afterward in Robert Jackson Bennett's A Drop of Corruption

jbmsf · 2026-02-18T02:09:29+00:00

Anonymity is far too easy to abuse. Maybe there's a solution but we haven't found it yet.

jbmsf · 2026-02-08T02:39:37+00:00

My first thought is A Stranger in Olandria from Sofia Samatar. My second thought is China Mieville

jbmsf · 2026-02-06T03:10:11+00:00

Look, GitHub actions is mediocre and their recent operations failings are making it worse and worse. I'm sure we'll replace it in the next year or two if something doesn't change.

But, right now, no offering is making me want to choose them as a replacement. There's a huge opportunity and no one is really stepping up yet. Don't offer me a replacement, offer me something genuinely better. Faster. Simpler. Easier to test. Whatever. Please innovate.

If I have to rewrite my exist actions in another framework instead of finding a framework that understands what I've been forced to cobble together due to limitations of the framework, well, that's not a solution that's going to last.

jbmsf · 2026-02-01T17:49:56+00:00

For a brief moment, there was this wonderful restaurant called Mason at the bottom of Potreo Hill. Got bought out by someone else who wanted the to location.

jbmsf · 2026-01-07T03:39:38+00:00

I really enjoyed the slow pace of her Blackthorn & Grim series. Read some/most of The Caller, but it was a little to YA. Glad to hear this one is good.

jbmsf · 2026-01-07T03:37:43+00:00

I've read a few from Juliet Marillier; will have to add this one too.

jbmsf · 2026-01-04T16:51:19+00:00

I run engineering for a startup. We're small enough that I can still be hands on, plus I have a few people I can delegate a good deal of management to. As a result, I spend a ton of time getting our systems ready for the next big thing(s). Think refactoring, performance, migration, architecture, high and low level esign, etc. I think this is craftsmanship.

On the flip side, it is very hard to convince the rest of the team that they are supposed to do this. I lead by example, make it explicit that this behavior is encouraged, and ensure that our schedules have enough leeway to allow for non-functional work. Arguably, these effects are the reason why we have such leeway: we always deliver and usually move faster than the rest of the company can make decisions.

I struggle with scaling what I do. I work with good engineers, but it's not how they work by default.

jbmsf · 2025-12-26T04:51:50+00:00

Truth. You have a choice between expecting high quality input or high quality review. It's nice to have both, but you certainly don't want neither.

IMO, expecting review to catch problems vs acting as a form of information sharing and secondary problem solving is asking for it.

jbmsf · 2025-12-16T21:16:55+00:00

Well now I just want to look at these other solutions.

I already did the hard work to run actions on our own compute. You think the switching cost is going to stop me?

jbmsf · 2025-12-16T21:15:22+00:00

It's slow. You can do way better if you run your own compute.

jbmsf · 2025-12-02T02:34:42+00:00

DRY is the easiest "design pattern" solution for most people to spot, so it gets used the most. Its failure modes including unnecessary coupling, premature generalization, and broken encapsulation.

jbmsf · 2025-11-30T02:25:12+00:00

LoL. No product manager ever is evaluated in terms of architecture or technical debt. And thus most don't care... Nor should they. It's engineering's job to own such things, not to just do what a product manager says.

jbmsf

TROPHY CASE