rdoherty

I love reading, here's a few meatier books I've read recently:

* Seeing Like a State - great overview of how states (and corporations) lose visibility into reality due to the abstraction levels they operate at

* Normal Accidents - all about how things like nuclear reactors, ships and large systems naturally have accidents

* Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty - great easy read about how high reliability organizations manage complexity and dangerous, high tempo situations.

It's not just the untyped problems, the runtime definitions of functions, properties, etc make it nearly impossible to debug unless you have the state of your production data locally. (Or you ssh into your prod server and open up a REPL, load the state and introspect everything there). Good luck debugging locally in a nice IDE. It's a horrific nightmare. I use to love Ruby until I had to debug it live.

Skimming the list, looks like most extensions are for scraping or automating LinkedIn usage. Not surprising as there's money to be made with LinkedIn data. Scraping was a problem when I worked there, the abuse teams built some reasonably sophisticated detection & prevention, and it was a constant battle.

This is probably one of the best summarizations of the past 10 years of my career in SRE. Once your systems get complex enough, something is always broken and you have to prepare for that. Detection & response become just as critical as pre-deploy testing.

I do worry about all the automation being another failure point, along with the IaC stuff. That is all software too! How do you update that safely? It's turtles all the way down!