Burn After Reading - Issue #1

An assortment of things I’ve read and enjoyed over the last week or so. Because of who I am and what I do, there’s a lot that’s tech-related, but it’s not *all* computers, I promise!

Chelsea Troy wrote a great article on Syllabus Design. I’ve done some basic syllabus design before, for short internal / client workshops, but it’s all been very ad-hoc - this article walks through a sample syllabus with context and rationale, and looks great for the next time I’m doing structured teaching.

DRMacIver’s Teach People How To Do Things hammers home that “hard work is sufficient for success” is a toxic and dangerous myth - working on *the right things* is absolutely crucial.

Another great post from DRMacIver on Building Friendships - you don’t really “make friends” so much as “build friendships”, and it’s worth thinking about that from a mechanical perspective (while important to acknowledge the problems with doing so!)

December has begun, and with it comes Christmas music. If you’re singing along to the refreshingly blunt classic that is the Pogues’ Fairytale of New York, Justin Myers makes a great point about why we should all be making a minor redaction.

Patrick McKenzie makes a great point about why there is often a difference between the documented and the actual rules of a system: “if sending a social signal is easy and obvious then it loses the signaling value”.

To Err Is Human is a great piece from Mara Schmid about human error, discovery, classification, and more - written in the context of skydiving, but highly applicable everywhere.

Finally, the law of England and Wales has picked up a number of myths and legends in its time, and The Law Commission has an excellent Fact or Fable? report addressing a number of these.

Attorney Van Lindberg writes about how MongoDB’s Server Side Public License is likely unenforceable. Licensing is complex, and the SaaS loophole is certainly an issue, but it doesn’t look like the SSPL is the way to resolve things.

I want you to document all the things, and the Yelp Production Engineering Documentation Style Guide from Chastity Blackwell is a great piece to help you with your documentation. I’m a big fan of companies publishing internal documents and guidance. I don’t want to reinvent the wheel and write my own web framework, I’d rather use an open source one and add on the bits unique to me - the same is true of so many policy documents, guidelines, procedures and more.

Similarly, the Atlassian Incident Handbook is a great set of documents on incident terminology, management, tracking and more - if you don’t have your own Incident Handbook this is a great place to start from, and if you do, there’s still undoubtedly some good things you could learn from this one.

Ten Platform Commandments from Charity Majors offers some great principles, advice and wisdom about platforms. My favourite is #2 - “[K]eep your critical path as small and independent as possible [..] You cannot care about everything equally, sacrifices must be made”, which generalises exceptionally well.

HostedGraphite have a nice piece on the importance of timing when updating your status page - unsurprisingly it boils down to “as soon and as much as practical” but goes into useful detail about what that can actually mean.

Corey Quinn has some great advice on How To Prepare for a (Tech) Conference Talk - I want to do more speaking in 2019, and I’ll be adding this to my checklist.

Finally, Lesley Carhart spots someone has monetised a bootable Linux USB stick. Assorted issues aside, that’s some good product/marketing/sales work!

That’s all from me, I hope you enjoyed it - thanks for reading to the end!

I’d really appreciate any and all feedback you have, even if it’s just “meh”, that’s still useful data.

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Cheers, Kristian