Archive • The Regular Virtanen, A Software Industry Thought Follower • Buttondown

Don't Trust Your Mind When It Tells How Something is Going to Feel Like

September 21, 2024

Our minds are incredibly good at creating a simulation that feels realistic of what happens when we actually do something. I say “feels realistic”, because...

KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2023: A Galvanization

One of the keynotes at the KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2023 started with the song Galvanize by The Chemical Brothers, which was not only appropriate with...

You Need a System Against Biases, Knowing About Them Doesn't Help

Introduction Perhaps the biggest pitfall about cognitive biases is that knowing about the biases does nothing to prevent them. In fact, it seems that the...

A Collection of My Recent LinkedIn Posts

Some time ago I decided to become active in LinkedIn. Don't ask why. I knew it was going to be a mistake and it was a mistake. The posts get some attention...

Update: You Can Access AWS Console With A Yubikey Without Hacks

January 31, 2023

In an earlier email I said that AWS's support for Yubikeys is a bit clunky and specifically that AWS Console (The Web UI (yet another instance of AWS's...

I Would Strongly Recommend Hardware MFAs ... But

January 10, 2023

In my small foray into the domain of cyber security I've had the opportunity to be introduced to the concept of security theater. Security theater are stuff...

Application Security Was Always Your Responsibility, DevSecOps Didn't Change That

January 6, 2022

I’ve been part of development teams that have transformed themselves into the DevOps culture and lately, DevSecOps. In a nutshell, DevOps means that instead...

Keeping Things Simple is not Always Simple, If Ever

Looking at our AWS bills, there was one particular line that stood out like a sore thumb. Data transfer. It seemed way out of proportion. “Doh!” I hear you...

Please Stop Mentioning the Dunning-Kruger Effect

Announcements and apologies I haven't written in a while, but that's mainly because I'm in the middle of switching jobs and it's pretty over-whelming right...

If You Leave an Exception Handler Untested, You're Part of the Problem

Announcements When I decided to create this newsletter, I honestly rationalised it by this being a basically a newsletter to my friends and acquaintances....

When I Debugged a NodeJS Problem That Froze Our Production

Hello to all subscribers (3) of this newsletter. Today I'm going to talk about a production problem I debugged some time ago. I'm not sure if there's a moral...