Tech Office Sketches · Here­with notes from the white-hot cen­ter of the In­ter­net soft­ware pro­fes­sion. Maybe the re­al­i­ty these re­flect pre­vails across oth­er tech­nol­o­gy ter­ri­to­ries, but I wouldn’t know. In no par­tic­u­lar or­der: ...
 
D&I Soundbites · I went to a two-day “D&I work­shop for leaders”. Many in biz will know what that stands for: Diver­si­ty and In­clu­sion. The peo­ple fa­cil­i­tat­ing were WMFDP, which stands for “White Men as Full Diver­si­ty Partners”. Hav­ing said that, on­ly one of the two was a white man, and the au­di­ence was more gender-diverse than the high-tech nor­m. Every­one was se­nior, there were lots of VPs in the room. It had a strong ef­fect on me ...
[7 comments]  
Jag Diary 9: Google Mapocalypse · 2019 is def­i­nite­ly the year of Lin­ux on… the dash­board. This Jaguar is the first car I’ve owned with a se­ri­ous in­fo­tain­ment sys­tem, and it’s opened my eyes to a few things, one of which might be a re­al Google vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty: se­ri­ous com­pe­ti­tion in the map space ...
[5 comments]  
Jag Diary 8: Road Trip! · To­day I drove the new I-Pace 290.3 most­ly high­way kilo­me­ter­s. In the best on­line I-Pace com­mu­ni­ty, the top top­ic, with 1,115 posts as I write, is I-Pace range. Be­cause when you come to elec­tric cars, range anx­i­ety is a thing. Today’s road-trip re­port will cov­er the gen­er­al high­way ex­pe­ri­ence but, since it’s the hot top­ic, will ze­ro in on range. Spoil­er: You can al­most al­ways go 300km with­out try­ing too hard ...
[2 comments]  
Jag Diary 7: I-Pace Over 100 · That’s over a hun­dred kilo­me­ters of course, which it took three days to achieve ...
 
Jag Diary 3: What We Know · Between June 4th, when the first wave of re­views of the New Jag hit (off­i­cal­ly the I-PACE, what a dumb name) and the time the sales­man called me say­ing “Time to sign the or­der if you want to be in the first wave”, I had to de­cide whether to spend a lot of mon­ey on a car I’d nev­er seen or touched. So I paid damn close at­ten­tion to those re­views. I’m a crit­i­cal read­er, and sus­pi­cious about the mo­tives of prod­uct re­view­er­s, and I think the pic­ture that emerges is pret­ty clear. This post is to enu­mer­ate what I think it’s pos­si­ble to know for sure about the car with­out hav­ing owned or even driv­en one. [Up­dat­ed based on hands-on ex­pe­ri­ence.] ...
[4 comments]  
Jag Diary 6: I-Pace Day Two · No high­ways were harmed in the prepar­ing of this blog frag­men­t; our new I-Pace is for the mo­ment an ur­ban run­about. In town, it doesn’t get you any­where faster than a Hon­da Fit or 20-year old Ford Fo­cus would. But those burn fos­sil fu­els and we should all try to stop do­ing that ...
[3 comments]  
Jag Diary 5: The Green Light · I picked up the new fam­i­ly wheel­s, a 2019 Jaguar I-Pace, on Jan­uary 12th. Cur­rent plans are for this blog frag­ment to get up­dates for the next cou­ple of week­s, through a planned road trip, per the “diary” part of the se­ries ti­tle ...
[2 comments]  
Oil Fail · To­day I learned things that I think ev­ery en­vi­ron­men­tal­ist and in­vest­ment man­ag­er should know: A co­her­ent ar­gu­ment that we are more or less at Peak Oil. Not the Nineties ver­sion, which wor­ried that we might be run­ning out of fos­sil fu­el­s, but rather that glob­al hu­man petroleum de­mand is about at its all-time peak and about to start drift­ing down. Some of the key da­ta points in­volve elec­tric cars, which I care a lot about, and Chi­na, which is al­ways in­ter­est­ing ...
[5 comments]  
Serverlessness · I work in AWS’s Server­less group, and in the pro­cess of pulling to­geth­er my pre­sen­ta­tion at re:In­vent, dis­cov­ered that I have a lot of opin­ions on the sub­ject and, while they may well be wrong, are at least well-informed. You can watch that YouTube, but who’s got an hour to spare? And any­how, blogging’s re­al­ly my fa­vorite medi­um, so here we go. If I tried to glom them all to­geth­er in­to one mega-essay it’d be bru­tal­ly long, so let’s go short-form ...
[3 comments]  
SF-5: Serverless Bills? · One of the best rea­sons to go server­less is that you might save a lot of mon­ey. This is es­pe­cial­ly true when your load is peaky and has qui­et times; be­cause when your in­fras­truc­ture isn’t work­ing, you’re not pay­ing. But, not all loads are peaky. And here’s a quote from an AWS in­ter­nal mail­ing list: “For ev­ery com­pute load, there’s some lev­el of TPS where Lamb­da is go­ing to be more ex­pen­sive than servers.” So, when is that? And how much should you care? ...
 
Christian Practice · I’m in Regi­na, Saskatchewan with fam­i­ly for the hol­i­days. Some­one said “Let’s go to a Christ­mas Eve car­ol service” and five of us did that. We went to Lake­view Unit­ed, where “United” sig­ni­fies the Unit­ed Church of Cana­da, the biggest Protes­tant de­nom­i­na­tion up here. It was up­lift­ing and pleas­ant and sort of sad. Dis­clo­sure: I’m not Chris­tian at al­l; but stil­l ...
[3 comments]  
SF-4: Serverless Latency? · Sup­pose we like the idea of go­ing server­less (we do). What should we wor­ry about when we make that bet? What I hear when I talk to peo­ple think­ing about it, most­ly, is la­ten­cy. Can a run-on-demand func­tion re­spond as quick­ly as a warmed-up Web serv­er sit­ting there in mem­o­ry wait­ing for in­com­ing work? The an­swer, un­sur­pris­ing­ly, is “it depends” ...
[5 comments]  
SF-3: Serverless Everything? · Some­times we fans get a lit­tle over-excited and de­claim that ev­ery­thing should be server­less. After al­l, we’re pret­ty con­vinced that own­ing da­ta cen­ters and com­put­ers is be­com­ing a thing of the past. Well then, how could con­fig­ur­ing your own hosts and pay­ing for them even when they’re not work­ing ev­er be a good idea? Let’s try to be mod­er­ate and prag­mat­ic: Server­less, where pos­si­ble ...
[1 comment]  
SF-2: Why Serverless? · Well ob­vi­ous­ly: Fru­gal­i­ty, se­cu­ri­ty, and elas­tic­i­ty. But I want more, I want bet­ter soft­ware ...
[1 comment]  
SF-1: What Is Serverless? · I don’t think it’s that com­pli­cat­ed: If you can’t see the servers in the ser­vice, then it’s server­less. Yeah, they’re still there, but the whole point is that you can most­ly not wor­ry about them ...
 
Step Functions Integration · On Thurs­day we launched some add-ons for AWS Step Func­tions, on which I helped a bit. As usu­al, there’s a nice Jeff Barr blog. This is to add de­sign notes and ex­tra col­or ...
[1 comment]  
Post-REST · More or less all the big APIs are REST­ful these days. Yeah, you can quib­ble about what “REST” means (and I will, a bit) but the as­ser­tion is broad­ly true. Is it go­ing to stay that way forever? Seems un­like­ly. So, what’s nex­t? ...
[7 comments]  
Car Capitalism · What hap­pened was, I was hurtling around a mall park­ing lot in a beau­ti­ful British-designed hundred-thousand-dollar sports car, and I thought “Is this the good side of capitalism?” ...
[5 comments]  
Car-Charge Economics · The Wikipedia ar­ti­cle on Elec­tric Car Use by Coun­try is in­ter­est­ing. Below I ex­cerpt a graph (mis­spellings: theirs) of the lead­ing electric-car ju­ris­dic­tion­s: As I write, Nor­way lead­s, at over 20%, while the US av­er­age is 1.5%. (Visit the Wikipedia link for the lat­est when­ev­er you read this.) How are all these cars go­ing to be fed? Let’s con­sid­er the fu­ture busi­ness of car-charging ...
[14 comments]  
What this is · Subscribe to ongoing
Truth · Biz · Tech
author · Dad · software · colophon · rights
Random image, linked to its containing fragment
When? (4961 fragments)
What? (334 categories)

By .

I am an employee
of Amazon.com, but
the opinions expressed here
are my own, and no other party
necessarily agrees with them.

A full disclosure of my
professional interests is
on the author page.