Good Reads, May 2014

A summary of the interesting articles I've found this month.

What is Site Reliability Engineering? An interview with Ben Treynor (Google VP, Site Reliability Engineering) -- SRE isn't just a new name for system administration, it is an entirely new business philosophy.

Distributed Systems and the End of the API -- APIs are like assembly language. Nobody programs in assembly language any more. So what's the high-level equivalent?

Big Cable says broadband investment is flourishing, but their own data says it's falling -- Remember folks, these are the companies that keep telling the media that people don't want gigabit broadband.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Checklists -- Checklists are awesome... and save lives.

ILLIAC I Programming Manual (1956) [pdf] -- How did those 5-ton room-sized computers work? Read the manual.

Non-technical read of the month:

Rat Park (comic) -- In comic form, Stuart McMillen explains a drug experiment that should have stopped The War On Drugs.

I have a new book coming out!

It is called "The Practice of Cloud System Administration" and it will be out in November 2014. If you want to be the first to get news about it, click here and tell me your email address. I promise I barely have time to send one email a month.

This month I learned:

• The reason I couldn't find a bash script that did a git rebase but only if it wouldn't cause a mess is because you don't need a script, just the --ff-only flag. You can set an alias so that git p does it:

  git config --global alias.p "pull --rebase --ff-only"

• I got an acceptance letter for one of my proposals at Velocity NYC.

• Jim Steinman, who wrote Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell also wrote one of my favorite songs The Sisters of Mercy's "This Corrosion".