Week 30-35, 2024 - Endless Summer
I’m back from a month of travel around France, something we try to do every year (we’re a French-Hungarian family living in Budapest). This is an opportunity to get a lot of cycling done, meet friends I rarely see, spend more time with family, and enjoy long drives with This American Life in the background. I’m grateful that the summer of 2024 provided plenty of the above.
This week's newsletter issue is a milestone to mark the closing of the vacation period and get back to the regular weekly cadence of Engineering Leadership topics, so apologies if the content is still less about that than usual.
📋 What I learned this summer
The Importance of Regular Maintenance
Just like with any other profession, some people in engineering feel that one of the most boring, seemingly pointless activities is the regular maintenance of a pre-existing system. It’s the opposite of exciting, the task is repetitive and dull, nothing new is being done, and there’s no feeling of accomplishment because if everything is done well, the result is that the system continues to perform as expected. Yet, if you fall into the temptation of neglecting regular maintenance, should it be small refactorings, upgrade of services, routine redeploys, etc., you gradually increase the risk of a catastrophic failure, which will require great efforts to mitigate and resolve, usually at the worst time.
Well, this summer cemented the knowledge that the same can be said about the human body too.
During a 2-week period, I managed to mix long, high-effort, sometimes multiday cycling trips with lazy days, when I barely got out of a lounger relaxing with a beer in my hand. The negligence of regular warm-ups, daily core strength exercises, and post-workout stretches resulted in a strong lower back pain that tainted the rest of the holiday, and from which I’m still just slowly recovering.
Society values creators higher than maintainers, whose work is often taken for granted – when in reality, it’s the foundation of a strong, resilient system. This was an important lesson to be reminded of.
First-hand Ansible Experiments
I started receiving suspicious emails that were not addressed to me, and because I couldn’t find a reassuring explanation, just to be safe I changed my Google Account password. I didn’t know until then that this results in the invalidation of all your App Passwords and the revoking of various Google Apps permissions, breaking multiple stuff from homelab SMTP mail handling to my inbox monitoring scripts. Fixing the former meant having to change a config file in 8 different VMs and LXCs, so it was a perfect opportunity to get my hands dirty with Ansible.
My knowledge about this tool was limited, dated, and high-level. I was familiar with the concept, and Ansible was extensively used in one of my earlier teams, but I never had the chance to try it myself. Fast-forward through 3 hours of Claude and ChatGPT discussions, and I created two playbooks: one for setting up a non-privileged user with public key authentication and sudo privileges; and another one to ensure DMA is set up on the box and configured with the proper password. I really liked that regardless of what stage the nodes were at, the same playbook worked out of the box to get them up to the same level. I think it would’ve taken me about twice the time to reach this point without the help of LLMs.
🎯 What I want to try next
We had a few motivating in-person sessions with Jeremy during the summer, which resulted in (amongst a bunch of beers consumed and meat grilled) clarity and alignment on where we want to take our podcast, The Retrospective. We’ll have an announcement about the details published soon after we had a chance to wrap up season one.
Next week I’m either getting back to the e-ink display I put aside in the spring, to be able to finish up the home display project I started a few months ago; or, since I’ve maxed out our family iCloud storage this month, consider liberating my media and move to something self-hosted like Immich.
Finally, those of you who know me personally are aware that earlier this year I quit my Senior Engineering Manager job to be able to better focus on various things, one of them being this website. As the summer ends, it’s time to start wrapping up this sabbatical and start to get back to the job market. I’ll use my Getting Hired series as a guide, and will probably provide updates on how things are going here.
📚 Books that made me think
Yes, instead of the usual article recommendations, I wanted to mention two non-technical summer readings that I finished in August.
Tim Moore: Another Fine Mess: Across the USA in a Ford Model T
I started to follow Tim Moore after reading about his adventure riding the 1914 Giro d’Italia with an era-appropriate bicycle, documenting his experiences in Gironimo!. This one, published in 2018, writes about his idea to visit all the US States that voted for Trump in 2016, in an original Ford Model T. The result is a book mixed with the historical account of the life of Henry Ford (spoiler: he was kind of a jerk), and Tim’s various interactions and experiences with the locals. As one reviewer said: too much Ford, not enough humor, and while I was fascinated by the cruel pragmatism of the guy, the book might have had fewer funny moments than his previous ones indeed.
Daniel Kehlmann: Lichtspiel
Kehlmann’s latest is unfortunately not translated to English yet, but there’s already a great Hungarian translation that allowed me to read it in my native language. The book is half fiction half documentary, about the German movie director G.W. Pabst, a contemporary of Fritz Lang and others, who, unlike most of his peers, returned to Germany at the end of the 1930s and created high-budget movies under the nazi dictatorship. It is a distressing and depressing read in places, not just because of the subject era, but the parallels with the current conditions in other countries. A good friend of mine recommended this book when we were debating about artistic freedom in dictatorships; and if and what compromises can be made to be able to create timeless art. Can an artist separate themselves from the political reality, and can the moral sacrifices they make be separated from the resulting artwork? Fact and fiction are intertwined effortlessly in the book, offering a fascinating glimpse into the potential behaviors of celebrities like P.G. Wodehouse and Leni Riefenstahl. Hope this will be translated to English soon.
🤖 Something cool: State of LLM-assisted Coding
I stumbled upon Steve’s video showcasing Cursor, the AI-empowered VS Code fork I’m also using. The part where he's live-coding is a good illustration of the collaborative, iterative nature of LLM-assisted development in 2024.
Still, the big change I foresee is not in developers’ productivity, but the enablement of magnitudes more people to work with code. This is in line with what Matt Welsh was talking about in his Craft Conference presentation, and what Gergely Orosz was writing about recently. I’m excited to see organizations moving towards Product Managers opening a Pull Request instead of a Jira ticket to change a button.
That’s it for today, have a late-summer tomato salad this weekend with just olive oil and salt,
Péter