The Most Interesting Reads in September 2023
Mostly tech, but I was listening to The Rest is History, too.
GTMTips: Tips For Logging In Server-side Tagging
- https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/tips-for-logging-server-side-tagging/#tip-3-find-console-logs-from-your-production-traffic
- I keep getting asked question — how to validate that data is coming into GTM SS container in production mode. This is the answer!
When in Preview mode, you can easily find the log output from the templates in your container by looking at the Console tab.But where can you view logs for hits that are not available in preview mode?
How architecture diagrams enable better conversations — Unravelled Development
- https://www.unravelled.dev/how-architecture-diagrams-enable-better-conversations/
- Learning mermaid and the visual language it provides — the three standard usecases are a nice addition to that journey.
Onboarding new team membersPlanning upcoming workCommunicating changes to other teams
Managing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) With Terraform
- https://spacelift.io/blog/terraform-infrastructure-as-code
- A bit of an overkill OR what a wonderful longread? Probably somewhere in the middle. Like the description of ClickOps. Been there, done that…
ClickOps is the term used to describe the manual management of IT infrastructure from the UI, by clicking into the portal to achieve a desired behavior (create/edit/delete resources). One may argue this process is enough for a small architecture that needs to be deployed, but there actually are some big issues with starting like this: you cannot easily scale and replicate your configuration. Imagine you are creating an EC2 Instance inside AWS. By using ClickOps, you are going to create it way faster than you would normally do it through Infrastructure as Code. But what happens if you need to create 10 EC2 instances? What about 100 EC2 instances? Let’s suppose it takes an engineer approximately two minutes to create an EC2 through the portal. For 100 instances, this will take a little over three hours, and maybe some can be ok with that. These 100 instances will also need to reside in a network, they will require security groups, maybe some EBS storage, and other things that will again take a lot of time to configure. Doing this manually is very error-prone, as our attention span cannot keep up with the large number of things that we have to do. By using Terraform, you can easily define all of these components as code, validate the code, plan to see what is going to happen, and in the end, deploy all resources in one go. Apart from that, you can easily scale and replicate your configuration without spending too much time.
Writing Wednesdays: Seth Godin’s The Practice
The practice is lifelong. The practice transcends aspiration for success. The practice endures when everything else fades. The practice is personal. It is ours alone. It is sacred.Observe any artist you admire — living or dead, male or female, wild-and-crazy or conventional and sane. Every one will have a practice, and if you ask them their secret, they’ll tell you, “I do it every day and nothing gets in the way of that.”
Jerusalem Demsas on The Dispossessed, Gulliver’s Travels, and Of Boys and Men (Ep. 189)
- https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jerusalem-demsas/
- Tylers views on men would be a bit provocative in places where men are active defenders I think
The notion that men do well in societies in relative terms when there’s a lot of war, and it’s better to get rid of war, but when you get rid of war, a lot of men won’t do that well because they’re not well-suited to that kind of society. That’s the alternative reading. That to me is more on the table than arguing about the small, “Do we start the men a year later?” which I’m not opposed to. I don’t know, but maybe we’re just better off shifting into a society where a lot more men do worse and suck it up and take the net gain of less war.
Is Bach the greatest achiever of all time? — Marginal REVOLUTION
- https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/09/is-bach-the-greatest-achiever-of-all-time.html
- Technocrats disagree, but incentives matters here.
addition to the daily demands on him to teach Latin and theology and supervise teenage boys and so on, there was the thousand small practical challenges of life in the eighteenth century. No electric lighting. Crappy parchment and quills. The cold, the disease, the lack of plumbing, the restricted access to information, talented players, and the manual nature of every little thing.And, perhaps most of all, to continue such a volume of high-quality output when the world seemed not to care. Yes, he had a local reputation among those in the know, but there were never any packed concert halls or grand tours to validate his efforts. He seems to have been entirely internally driven by his genius and his commitment to the eternal and divine.
Guy de Maupassant — Wikipedia
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_de_Maupassant
- Another of the great artistic “achievers” — but, on his epitaph, it says “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.” which I don’t thik would even cross Bach’s mind. +1 for Bach.
In 1880 he published what is considered his first masterpiece, “Boule de Suif”, which met with instant and tremendous success. Flaubert characterized it as “a masterpiece that will endure”. This, Maupassant’s first piece of short fiction set during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, was followed by short stories such as “Deux Amis”, “Mother Savage”, and “Mademoiselle Fifi”.
Annie Ernaux — Wikipedia
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Ernaux
- I have tipped my fingers into “Years” that was translated also into Czech, something I believe only an old, experienced author could create, the mixture of autobiography and history referring to youself in the third person.
Tackling Data’s Biggest Culture Problem — by Chad Sanderson
(1) #SPWK 2023: Vendor Wars — Digital Analytics Vendors Panel Discussion (JAN 31) — YouTube
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDDpC0LkbFw
- Toastmasters-like Debate about various vendors for analytics
You are a morale-driven machine — Alexey Guzey
- https://guzey.com/morale/
- One of the greatest this year, there is something about the raw format and the wisdom of the approach that makes me coming back to this.
To have high morale is to believe that you are able to do the things you want to do; to have low morale is to believe the opposite.Either state is stable, and your brain will act to reinforce it, so that reality matches its expectation.Everything — everything — either increases or decreases morale.Morale is your motive force, and you live or die by its maintenance.
The Rest Is History: The Jewish Revolt on Apple Podcasts
- https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-jewish-revolt/id1537788786?i=1000558209443
- On the role of Jewish Revolt in the succession of Nero, the fact that Vespasian the emperor was in charge, the fact that the siege of Jerusalem was similar to the siege of Carthage and many hitherto unknown fascinating facts.
The Rest Is History: Nero on Apple Podcasts
- https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/nero/id1537788786?i=1000522860140
- Nero, great fire of Rome, space for his city planning, later used by Flavians to build Colloseum.
Karl Ove Knausgaard on ‘The Wolves of Eternity,’ Fiction, Family, and Fame
- https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a45157203/karl-ove-knausgaard-the-wolves-of-eternity-interview/
- On influence, a bit. Knausgaard writing on writing is essential reading.
Knausgaard has been compared to Marcel Proust for the way he moves capaciously through time; the careful, acute attention he pays to the life that lives inside of the mundane. He has a masterful sense of the elasticity and utility of movement within a fictional space. When I asked him about this, he said his three key texts (his answer to almost every question involves another text, a work of art, a film) are Proust, James Joyce’s Ulysses (“though I’m not sure if I like it, really,” he says), and Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. “That’s why I called the My Struggle books fiction,” he said, “because they deal with time the way only fiction can.”
You Must Be Able To Do This
- https://dailystoic.com/you-must-be-able-to-do-this/
- Should or Should you not raise voice re: Kids ? Damn.
hey slow time down. “The best military decision-makers,” he writes, “have an ability to swiftly synthesize sensor data from radars, sonars, and communications nets; mentally check it against intelligence received…correlate the threat; discern the intentions of the enemy; and act decisively…”Ok, but how do they do it? How did Marcus Aurelius manage to do it, despite the swirling and very understandable emotions brought up by betrayal and danger and uncertainty? Stavridis recommends what is essentially basic Stoicism. “You do that,” he writes, “by being reasonably rested; clearing your mind of all the excess white noise (including your personal thoughts); breathing deeply and steadily; lowering your voice, never raising it; and constantly moving your field of view across the sensors and members of the firing team arrayed in front of you.”
DevOps is terrible 2023
- https://abidmoon.hashnode.dev/2023-devops-is-terrible
- Describing my job — kind of! Wondering why would not the SRE book not be of help here.
What is DevOps?The shift1. DevOps/Cloud teams are overbooked2. Silos are (never really) broken, infrastructure is!3. Create, configure, repeat4. Software Engineering boundariesThe solutionPlatform EngineeringExplaining Platform EngineeringKey features of an IDP
Rethinking infrastructure as code from scratch
- https://nathanpeck.com/rethinking-infrastructure-as-code-from-scratch/
- Rethinking declarative languages around IAC with the inspiration — surprise surprise — from HTML/CSS!
What’s wrong with the infrastructure as code that we have?Cloud will not get simplerInfrastructure as code will not get simplerLearning from another declarative languageRethinking infrastructure as code declarationsWhat if we had CSS for infrastructure as code?Summary of benefits of this approachTry it out for yourselfKnown limitations and the futureConclusionPSWant to discuss
viralinstruction.com/posts/hardware/
- https://viralinstruction.com/posts/hardware/
- low level beauty
