Our job is all about tradeoffs.

This article describes tradeoffs of database indices.

#databases

I think, this could be a good Friday read: "When Change Outruns Us" is a tale about sustained progress.


The main point of this article is that smart companies do not push for "constant change for the sake of change", but rather adopt a more cyclic pace, when the periods of extensive work are followed by more relaxed times.

This article is particularly interesting to me, because I've just finished listening to the "Slow Productivity" book by Cal Newport. One of the principles, outlined in that book, is that one should work in their natural pace. However, a constant run is no one's natural pace. Another observation in that book, is that starting from the second half of the XX century, managers started to approximate work by "business", i.e. if you look busy, you do some work, even if in the reality, there are zero outcomes.

Many tech companies like to claim that they are "outcomes-oriented" or "value impact", but in my experience, "business" is still the approximation for work. Especially, once a company growth beyond the size, when everyone naturally knows everyone, as well as what they are doing.

#culture #mgmt

A topic on Reddit that argues for a new term - Claude Hole. This is when AI is tasked with fixing an issue, but you actually end up further away from the fix after the AI changes.

This reminded me of a completely unrelated article - I Was Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn and All I Got Was 1.50 EUR - in that story, the author also ended up further away from their destination than at the beginning of their journey.

Regardless of your views on AI, distinguishing good from bad becomes more and more valuable these days.

#ai

I found a young blog that has some potential. There are two articles so far:

- Frameworks for understanding databases
- Sorted string tables (SST) from first principles

If you've read "Designing Data-Intensive Applications" by Martin Kleppmann and "Database Internals" by Alex Petrov, you may find these articles repeating information from those books. However, unless you actively work on building databases, you may easily forget this information.

So, such articles serve as a great reminder. I enjoy getting back to such "low level" details from time to time. These details help one to better understand the tradeoffs of the end solution, in my opinion.

#databases

Another Friday read on the Culture debt.

The core idea behind it is the same as for the technical debt, but this time it’s about the culture. As company growths, relationships within it inevitable change. This is silly to ignore these changes. Yet, if nothing is done, the culture can drift away, and then it’s much harder to fix, than refactoring a couple of services.

Also, this line strikes hard, when talking about the symptoms of the culture debt: “What you reward diverges from what you say you value.”

People are quite good in calling bullshit on someone or something. It’s often quite obvious when proclaimed values are just empty slogans. This erodes trust as nothing else.

#culture

“How much memory does a Kubernetes node use without the Kubernetes layer”? This is exactly the question From RSS to WSS: Navigating the Depths of Kubernetes Memory Metrics tries to figure out.

And the answer to this question might be harder to get to, as it seems at the first glance.

#kubernetes #systems

For today's donations Monday, I'd like to share once again the standing Monobank jar for FPV equipment.

This jar is for the unit in which a guy from my wife's hometown serves.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/4WLw91UqFe

#donations #Monday

Wanna become a true Terraform SLOPerator?

Here is a carefully vibecoded solution by Anton Babenko. I can confirm that he checks the docs at least once during his Claude conversations, so you can be confident in the quality :)

Jokes aside, this is a cool Skill for Claude Code, which currently works better than any other official or popular alternative out there.

#terraform #ai #claude

Bring Back Ops Pride is a new article by Charity Majors on how it comes that the operational work is often seen as of lower importance, and why is it bad.

This is her answer to the comments under her another article “You Had One Job”: Why Twenty Years of DevOps Has Failed to Do it. This article has some interesting ideas, but it's a marketing material, so beware.

#ops #culture

Unfortunately, kubectl flame tool for profiling in Kubernetes wasn't updated in 4 years. It cannot even run on ARM-based machines.

But what if you need to profile something in your systems? You can use continuous profiling, if it's available in your observability stack.

Or you can use kubectl prof to do some ad-hoc profiles.

- Tool on GitHub
- Medium post

#kubernetes #performance

A book bundle for exam and interview preparations from Manning press.

I'm not sure how good are those books outside the context of interviews, but Manning books usually considered good.

#books

I know that the last thing you'd like to see on Wednesday is yet another remote code execution possibility in Kubernetes, but here you are.

Kubernetes Remote Code Execution Via Nodes/Proxy GETPermission

and here's a lab for that.

tl;dr: web sockets use GET to initiate a connection and then upgrade it, but the permissions are only checked for GET, regardless of what you send through that web socket later. Thus, read permissions are enough to run some code.

P.S. This news came from the chat. If you want to join our chat (in Ukrainian), you can use this link.

#kubernetes #security