Week 29, 2024 - Summer Break
We’re starting our yearly family vacation very soon, so this is probably the last Friday update until the end of the summer. We haven’t managed to publish more The Retrospective episodes, editing is a tedious process and we got distracted by life. Watch this space though, we have some great stuff in the pipes that Jeremy and I will try to launch soon.
📋 What I learned this week
Preparing to be away from home for a few weeks, I finally set up my whole home lab to keep itself up-to-date. Nothing complicated, just unattended-upgrades on every VM and LXC, and a daily cron on OpenMediaVault. I’m slightly worried that a bad update might make me end up in a pickle, not unlike millions of Windows computers around the world today. Still, with my tailscale setup, I have all the means to fix issues remotely except for walking up to the computer and pressing the power button. Fingers crossed I won't need that.
🤔 Articles that made me think
Crowdstrike thread on Reddit
It only started this morning and someone already mentioned “This is what y2k wishes it was”. Just one example, someone working in healthcare mentioned close to a quarter million devices down, most needing manual interventions (read: walking up to the computer and pressing the power button) for a fix. Gergely Orosz blames it on the lack of a staged rollout, and it seems like a fair point, I’m similarly struggling to understand how can a bug in a kernel-level update that results in a blue screen of death go unnoticed. I’m looking forward to reading the postmortem on this one once the dust settles.
Companies who thought they didn’t need managers
I like this list because when an organization decides they just go ahead and ditch most management levels, it’s great material for the press, fuelling the popular narrative that bosses don’t do anything productive — but I rarely see an update on how those experiments work out. I’m clearly impartial on this one, and I understand the motive: dysfunctional managers can bring down entire departments, and it’s easy to assume it’s not the person but the title. But, a great manager’s impact goes similarly beyond their scope, so instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, organizations should look at finding and supporting managers who can focus on their teams’ health and execution.
🤖 Something cool: Dotwatching
The 10th Transcontinental Race is about to start on Sunday, and I can’t wait to jump into another one of my hobbies living in the overlap of cycling and geekery: Dotwatching. The TCR is a self-supported long-distance ultra-endurance cycling race, where contestants need to get from BrestRoubaix, France to Istanbul, Turkey as fast as possible, without any external help (that wouldn't be available for any other competitor too). They can take whatever route they believe is the most optimal, but have to include four obligatory sections in Europe. I started to follow this event in 2019, the same year Fiona Kolbinger, a german medicine student at the time completed the race in slightly more than 10 days, way ahead of the second finisher, Ben Davies. (Women and men compete without any differentiation in TCR, which I find a great thing moving away from the usual patronizing attitude of most organized sports towards women, and Fiona's dominating win proves my point.)
Since every participant is wearing a device broadcasting their location realtime (which they can turn off during stops for safety reasons, for example, to hide their exact sleeping location), over the years more and more people started to follow the race by watching the positions (the “dots”) and matching the information with social media posts, google street views, news, etc., trying to figure out what’s going on. It's such an exciting feeling seeing what routes competitors chose, speculating why they stopped, or how long they can go at this speed at night. By now, dotwatching has its dedicated site, covering many races besides the TCR, but it’s still one of the most important events in the year.
That’s it for today, go further this summer, and see you in September,
Péter