Economists love to talk about government deficit spending as “borrowing money from the future.” It’s a neat mental model that helps explain fiscal policy: we take on debt today to fund infrastructure, social programs, or whatever, and future taxpayers will pay it back. The model implies a simple trade-off between present and future consumption, mediated by interest rates and growth projections. There’s just one problem: you can’t actually borrow steel from the future.| The Nukemblog
A long time ago I worked for a Porn company. As someone who grew up orthodox Jew and turned secular later in life, I had to consciously reorient my moral compass regularly; When a recruiter for that company contacted me I suspended my knee jerked “no” reaction and asked myself “why?” - it’s not like I hadn’t watched porn occasionally (I later learned to avoid it, it’s basically sexual junk food), so what’s my problem supporting its creation? And if I do have a problem with it,...| The Nukemblog
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Have you ever walked into an office and saw a huge flat screen on the wall displaying a dashboard with pretty graphs, or some other nice visualization showing some important looking numbers? Back when people still frequented offices, many had them. But have you ever wondered, what are they for? No engineer is looking at them, because when you are looking at data you want to interact with the data, zoom, pan or apply some filter. And if the data requires immediate action, you would set an aler...| The Nukemblog
In a world where anything has an API, everything is a software problem nukemberg My name is Avishai Ish-Shalom, AKA @nukemberg on Twitter. I’m a software/systems engineer and manager, working mainly in Operations and backend development. I was a developer advocate for ScyllaDB, an Engineer in Residence at Aleph VC, and prior to that I led a backend team at Wix.com. In a previous life I was the co-founder & CTO of Fewbytes - a well-known consulting firm in Israel - where I’ve spent 6 years...| The Nukemblog
From meetup groups to job listings to titles on LinkedIn, full-stackers are all around. but for a term so prevalent it is surprisingly ambiguous. What is a “full-stack” developer? What does she do? What is the scope of her work? Does our company need one? Practical questions I imagine have crossed the minds of many VP R&Ds and CTOs. It would have been nice to have a common definition, but human languages is dynamic and evolves, so fragmentation and ambiguity are part of the game. Mostly i...| The Nukemblog
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Since I’ve abandoned Facebook my primary source of tech news has become Twitter and this week my feed is raging with two seemingly unrelated security/privacy incidents: Zoom’s zero day and Superhuman’s email tracking scandal. I write “seemingly”, because despite these being two very different companies operating in two different markets (Zoom in video conference calls and Superhuman in emails), building very different products (Zoom is all about jump in, jump out - Superhuman is a w...| The Nukemblog
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In the last 40 years, the philosophy of safety and reliability has changed dramatically in the world of high risk industries. This has prompted many organizations in various risk-prone fields to adopt new methods and processes and sometimes even undergo a radical cultural and managerial change.| The Nukemblog
Structured data, dynamic data, big data, data driven….. we hear about data all the time. But what is “data” exactly? The term is frequently used, yet is rarely defined or thought of - and it turns out the answer to “what is data” is not simple at all. “Data” is a software concept which describes real world properties and information - and there must exist some process of creating “data” from those properties. This “data modeling” process is one of the most fundamental an...| The Nukemblog
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A few months back, the twittershphere rumbled on how wrong it is that conference speakers are not paid. In tweets and blogs, people have called out for conferences to pay speakers travel expenses and even pay them a fee for their work in preparing and delivering the talks. As an example, this article on medium.com. Initially, I was taken by the arguments: If someone is travelling from afar to speak, their costs should be reimburse. If one is devoting her time to create good talks, she should ...| The Nukemblog
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I’m usually a private person and I don’t publicly write about personal stuff - This is my first ever personal public piece. There are several reasons why I’m writing this; Since John Willis brought up the issue of burnout to the spotlight there has been a spur of blog posts and articles about burnout and some people have been gracious enough to share their personal story. After reading people’s stories I came to realize how important it is to share those experiences, I’ll get back t...| The Nukemblog
Every corporation and enterprise want a private cloud these days. The arguments vary from company to company, usually revolving around security, cost, independence and strangely enough — reliability. I could argue that given the track record of most enterprise IT departments it seems dubious they can improve even one of these parameters compared to a public cloud, but I won’t. It turns out there’s no point refuting those arguments, because, and I cannot emphasize this enough: You ar...| The Nukemblog
Reliability promotes failures. Failures promote reliability When a system is reliable long enough, production pressure causes the operators to drive the system harder; Over time operators become less careful as the trauma of the last failure wears off. More workload is applied, new features introduced, etc, until the system trails again into the danger zone (e.g. high load once thought to be dangerous), sailing through smoothly this time, thus boosting the confidence of operators in the robus...| The Nukemblog
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography As I became more involved in workshops and training, I observed many people coming from old-school sysadmin backgrounds struggle with the moderns tools and methodologies that the SRE and DevOps movements are promoting. I often wonder why it so hard for som...| The Nukemblog
During my years of consulting, I’ve run into many managers (in enterprises and startup companies alike) who just didn’t get this whole “technical debt” thing. You’ve run into those managers too, I’m sure - the kind of manager who issues pressing deadlines, marks bug reports for left-over time (which never comes), relies on VMotion or fancy SAN for high availability, refuses upgrades because of “risks” and urges you to “stop wasting your time listening to tech talks and go wr...| The Nukemblog
2 - a technical co-founder and a business co-founder. Since they don’t have enough money for proper lightbulb they use an old socket and lightbulb they found in the garage and since they don’t fit the technical co-founder builds a makeshift adapter from duct tape and aluminum foil. This actually works as long as you don’t tilt it too much. During seed negotiations the co-founders break up and the technical co-founder leaves.| The Nukemblog
A long time ago I worked for a Porn company. As someone who grew up orthodox Jew and turned secular later in life, I had to consciously reorient my moral compass regularly; When a recruiter for that company contacted me I suspended my knee jerked “no” reaction and asked myself “why?” - it’s not like I hadn’t watched porn occasionally (I later learned to avoid it, it’s basically sexual junk food), so what’s my problem supporting its creation?| The Nukemblog
Campfire roasted Marshmallow is a childhood classic. Everybody knows what Marshmallow tastes like… Or do they? Because, as it turns out, Marshmallow doesn’t contain any Marshmallow! Marshmallow confection was originally made from Marshmallow root (hence the name) but as food industry was moving to mass production the original recipe was changed to utilize widely available and cheap materials such as corn starch and gelatin; Marshmallow root was expensive and not available outside of Europ...| The Nukemblog
Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders| The Nukemblog
Game Day at Obama for America| The Nukemblog
When I was a small boy I used to spend hours playing the “war” card game. The thing about this game is, it’s totally predictable and deterministic - each player gets a shuffled half of the deck and cards are extracted one by one in order. No chance or skill involved whatsoever and the result is completely determined by the pack you were dealt - we could just as well determine the winner by a coin toss. It really is a stupid game when you think about it, assuming you value games where th...| The Nukemblog
In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. Dwight D. Eisenhower What would you give for the ability to predict the future? a lot I presume. Knowing the future (and being free to act on it) can make you rich, successful, almost indestructible. What would you give to know the future with 90% probability of being right? well, if you can participate in the lottery every week 90% pretty much guarantees success, definitely valuable. What about...| The Nukemblog
In one scene of the classic “Alice in Wonderland” movie, Alice encountered cards painting rose bushes. The fact is, miss: we planted the white roses by mistake. And, the queen, she likes them red. If she saw what we did, she’d raise a fuss and each of us would quickly lose his head. Alice in Wonderland [source] Unfortunately for the cards, the queen notices the paint and beheads them anyway.| The Nukemblog
“No” is one of the most important yet underused word in our languages. It’s importance cannot be overstated, yet in our culture saying “no” is often considered a negative. Saying “no” is frowned upon, sometimes considered rude, unfriendly or even aggressive - and when you say “no” people get angry. As a result, some people are terrified of saying “no” and their inability to say “no” makes them a danger to themselves and everyone around them. This may sound outrageous...| The Nukemblog
One of the repeating motifs of recruiting in the software industry are mantras of “talent”: “We recruit the best talent”, “talent attracts talent”, “we value talent” and so on. Some companies have so called “head of talent”, “talent acquisition”, “talent development” professionals on their payroll - basically a re-branding of HR. With the amount of conversations, conference talks and hype going on around talent, you would expect people will have an answer to the qu...| The Nukemblog
In Israel it occasionally happens that someone declares himself “king of the Jews”, “messiah” or even the “reincarnation of Jesus Christ” - it’s quite common and has been dubbed the “Jerusalem Syndrome”. We have quite a few of these prophets, along with a healthy supply of self proclaimed gurus, rabbi’s and cult leaders with their respective followers. We also have a horde of state endorsed religious nutcases (Israel does not have separation of church and state) with varyi...| The Nukemblog
No, engineers don’t suck at time estimates - and generally speaking humans are better estimators than what most people believe. This seems rather surprising given all we’ve heard about the problems of bad time estimations, projects going overboard, etc and of course, your personal experience with software time estimates. But if people are really bad at estimation, how does that fit with our obvious evolutionary need to make quick decisions based on partial data? if we can’t estimate wel...| The Nukemblog
One of the things that struck me the most when observing managers at work, and in particular newly instated managers, is how managers become more and more out of touch with the realities of work. There’s actually a lot of research on that from quite a bit of different perspectives. Safety research for example has interesting things to say about “work as imagined” and “work as done”. This doesn’t happen over night of course, but rather a slow process - and I found it has a lot to d...| The Nukemblog
