Best of 2022
‘Tis the season for “best of”s and wrap ups, so here is mine. (Not all of these things came out in 2022, but I either experienced them or re-experienced them in a significant way.)
Okay, here we go:
Movies
Some awesome things I watched.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
I think this is the only new movie I saw this year; I caught it on the flight to Hawaii. Absolutely jaw-dropping. The best, understated, summary I read of it was “A woman struggles to prepare for her IRS audit.” But really, it is an absurdist, kung-fu movie that will have you questioning and then coming to terms with your life choices. Please watch.
Dr. Strangelove
Before there was Doctor Strange, there was Doctor Strangelove. This is not at all a new movie. However, I had to watch it again after reading Ellsberg’s “The Doomsday Machine”, which references it several times. Although the movie is a fictional account of how everything might go horribly wrong between two nuclear superpowers during the Cold War, apparently it was realistic (though largely unanticipated) enough of a scenario that it made a bunch of military analysis go “um…oh shit.” Anyway, one of my favorite movies upon watching and it remains that way to this day.
Articles
Here are a bunch of articles I read from the interwebz this year that I thought were noteworthy.
General Interest
The Only Crypto Story You Need
If you’re still confused about what cryptocurrencies are or why they’re all over the news, this excellent article is really the only thing you need to read to get caught up. It is written by Bloomberg’s excellent Matt Levine who breaks it all down. (Runner up is everything else that Matt Levine writes in his weekly newsletter, Money Stuff, which covers everything interesting that happens in finance. Most of which has involved Elon Musk in one way or another this year.)
The Story of VaccinateCA
Written by Twitter’s (and Stripe’s) own @patio11, this is a story that recounts the early days of the vaccine roll out and how one team of scrappy engineers stepped up where the government couldn’t/wouldn’t in order to get vaccines in as many arms, as fast as possible. This is not only an excellent review of the roll-out of one site in particular, but a great discussion of the politics of vaccination in this country, and how some well-intentioned policies delayed the vaccination of the public.
(See also: Small is Beautiful: The Launch Failure of Healthcare.gov)
Scan of the Month: Batteries
I came across this website, scan of the month, this year. It provides a fascinating view into every day objects through the use of a CT scan. This particular article covers batteries, but my second favorite is their scan of Lego minifigures.
Business
Coordination Headwind: How Organizations Are Like Slime Molds
Written by, Alex Komoroske, the Head of Corporate Strategy at Stripe, this is a presentation on organizational behavior-at-scale, and how we may think about self-organization.
Engineering-focused
Trunk and Branches Model for Scaling Infrastructure Organizations
Another person and ex-Stripe I follow around the internet, in this post Will Larson discusses using a “trunk and branches” model for scaling infrastructure teams within a company.
Exit the Haunted Forest
This is an article from Stripe’s publication Increment (which is sadly no longer being published.)
This was a concept that most experienced software developers are familiar with, but one that I had never heard named. It’s a code base that is largely a black box to those that work on it; it resists attempts are refactoring and clean up. It is impervious to automated tooling while at the same time is an active source of misery for folks at the company. It may even be difficult to tell if it is broken because no one is quite sure how it should work.
This article suggests from strategies for attacking the Haunted Forests we work with.
Avoiding the ‘SLOs as Reliability Theater’ trap
One of the things I spent 2022 working on at Stripe was improving our operational culture and rigor; that is, how we keep our systems running and healthy and doing the things they’re supposed to do. My efforts have been greatly influenced by my time at AWS, but Stripe presented it’s own unique challenges.
One such challenge was the lack of a pre-existing culture of using metrics to set and communicate expectations about system performance. Where previously I was working at a company where this was already baked into the culture, at Stripe there was more of a challenge to invent this culture from scratch, with the principal challenge being to thread the needle between not monitoring our systems closely enough and becoming overly fixated on metrics while missing the proverbial forest through the trees.
(I also recommend “Embracing SRE as an incomplete approach to reliability” by the same author as a companion read.)
TLS Fingerprinting with JA3 and JA3S
From the department of “I bet you didn’t know you could do that,” some interesting bits about how to fingerprint (that is, recognize) certain clients by how they make their TLS connections over the web. This is useful if you’re in the business to detection malicious people on the internet, especially when it comes to recognizing the baddies you’ve seen before and stopping them before they get to do something else naughty.
Books
Immune by Philipp Dettmer
If at any point during the pandemic, you’ve wanted to learn more about how our immune systems actually work, this is the book for you. This is a book that goes really deep (way deeper than anything I ever learned in high school biology) into the magnificently complicated machine that is our immune system. Despite the complexity, the material is very approachable, and the author does an excellent job explaining it for the common joe.
This should really be on the list under Amelia’s favorite however, as she asks me to go through the pictures with her every night. A few days ago we were drawing a human body and she asked me to draw the thymus. If you read this, you’ll also know what a thymus is.
Where is my flying car? by J. Storrs Hall
So, where is it?
This is a book from Stripe Press about the bits of the imagined future that still elude us. This book probably spends too much time discussing the flying cars specifically, but there is also a lot about cheap, nuclear energy, nanotechnology, and how much investments into both of those fields could unlock in the future.
One from Many by Dee Hock
This is a book about the history of Visa credit cards by their first CEO. It is a stranger history than you’d think.
(I also strongly recommend, Electronic Value Exchange by David Stearns, for a third-party account of the same story. )
Foundation by Isaac Asimov
This is my first Asimov novel, though I hope it won’t be my last. I don’t have much to say about it except it was a great sci-fi pairing with Where is my flying car?
Cheers for now! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
Aleks