Update

I am not affiliated and this is not endorsed, etc.

I was just a huge fan of his Double Shot series in particular and wanted to preserve his work.

Many thanks for pointing me in the direction of so many cool things over the years. Best of luck!

End of the Road

Yesterday was the last real Double Shot. I'm retiring, from working in software and from the Internet in general.

I've been writing code for over 40 years. I've been doing daily news roundups for decades, first in the Microsoft world and later in open source land. And frankly I'm just tired.

Looking back, I'm also not super-happy with how the industry has evolved. There was a time when I could believe and hope that software was making the world a better place. Looking around, I'm not so sure any more. Money and power have seized pretty much everything related to software, and the rising tide of surveillance, manipulation, and generally rapacious behavior appears to be getting worse all the time. It's become harder and harder to find any industry niche that I feel comfortable in working any longer. My sincere blessings to those of you who are still fighting the good fight, but as I said, I'm tired.

So, I'm done. This domain will remain online until the registration expires, and then it's gone. If you want anything, grab it now.

• What can a pipe wrench teach us about software engineering? - How to describe things precisely, that's what.
• Nickel: Better configuration for less - Yet another configuration file format.
• This website is killing the planet - Some ways to reduce your online carbon footprint.
• 1Password for Linux beta is now open - If I was planning a new laptop this would be an essential tool for me.
• Sound of Colleagues - Simulate office sounds in your browser.
• Choose your browser carefully - Well, try to. These days they basically all suck.
• Stripe is the next Google - Another sad fact.
• Google Antitrust Notes - Sensible thoughts from Tim Bray.

• Obscurix - "Obscurix is an open source, live operating system based on Arch Linux that is heavily configured for privacy, security and anonymity."
• eul - Open-source MacOS monitoring utility.
• Git Crash Course, Part 1 - Practical skills for new git users.
• Whose computer is it? - Apple's, of course. More Big Company BS.
• Boring Generators - Rails generators to install various frequently-users chunks of stuff.
• Celebrating 15 years of Git: An interview with Git maintainer Junio Hamano - Hard to believe that git hasn't been around forever.
• Forcing Functions in Software Development - Ways to make issues show up sooner.
• Introducing Stimulus components - An attempt to beef up the Stimulus ecosystem.

• Temporal - "Temporal is the open source microservices orchestration platform for running mission critical code at any scale."
• Stealth - "Secure, Peer-to-Peer, Private and Automatable Web Browser/Scraper/Proxy"
• Emerging Architectures for Modern Data Infrastructure - I've long ago lost track of the big data ecosystem.
• Chrome exempts Google sites from user site data settings - More BS from big companies.
• The Lead Squad Protocol - One way to coordinate work across multiple agile teams.
• BetterThanJson - A collection of various data serialization formats.
• I’ve been an engineer and a recruiter. Hiring is broken. Here’s why… and what it should be like instead. - Good luck.
• RuboCop 1.0 - It's out.

• Glow - "Glow is a terminal based markdown reader designed from the ground up to bring out the beauty—and power—of the CLI."
• Managing technical quality in a codebase. - "At a well-run and successful company, most of your previous technical decisions won't meet your current quality threshold."
• Iceraven Browser! - "Our goal is to be a close fork of the new Firefox for Android that seeks to provide users with more options, more opportunities to customize (including a broad extension library), and more information about the pages they visit and how their browsers are interacting with those pages."
• Themed days, Timeboxing and why you should use them. - Maximize your time by minimizing context switching.
• The Developer Experience Gap - "The technology landscape today is a Scrooge McDuck-level embarrassment of riches."
• How to measure technical debt - An attempt at a taxonomy.
• bunkerized-nginx - "nginx Docker image secure by default."
• Hands-Free Coding - "How I develop software using dictation and eye-tracking"

• Defective DevOps - Good DevOps takes time, and communication is more important than tools.
• Webpack 5 release - "So today (2020-10-10) webpack 5.0.0 is released, but this doesn't mean it's done, bugfree or even feature-complete."
• Departure.rb - Non-locking MySQL migrations backed by pt-online-schema-change.
• Please stop using CDNs for external Javascript libraries - Probably tilting at windmills these days, but valid points.
• Announcing pg_stat_monitor Tech Preview: Get Better Insights Into Query Performance in PostgreSQL - A new tool from Percona.
• You Don’t Have to Use Docker Anymore - It's not the only container game in town.

• The Grand Unified Theory of Product Ideation - Various ways to think about generating new product ideas.
• Diffend – OSS supply chain security and management platform for Ruby - Moving along fast.
• What happens if you become a director without being a manager first? - You have to learn new skills really fast, for one thing.
• Modern-Day Architecture Design Patterns for Software Professionals - "Circuit Breaker, CQRS, Event Sourcing, Sidecar, Backend-for-Frontend, and Strangler"
• Dockerfile Security Best Practices - There are always new ways to shoot yourself in the foot.
• Waterfall-ish: how not to build a Cloud-Native organization - Cloud-native theater is a thing these days.

• Advice to my young self: forget side projects and focus on your job - "The best way to dig a new technology is to practice it in your daily job."
• Branch Agnostic Git Aliases - Renaming your default branches doesn't have to be a mess.
• The Semantics of Semantic Versioning? - Deciding what constitutes a "breaking change" is not cut and dried.
• Plug'nPwn - Connect to Jailbreak - Bad things you can do to a Mac with enough hardware chops.
• 1-on-1 Meetings: More Important than Ever - Staying connected in a time of pandemic.
• Ron, why do you ... - The best agile practices grow out of delivering value.
• ActiveSnapshot - "Simplified snapshots and restoration for ActiveRecord models and associations with a transparent white-box implementation."
• delta - "A viewer for git and diff output"

• world smallest office suite - You can do a lot just with contenteditable and a bit of JavaScript.
• Application testing with Apache JMeter - A quick look at one load-testing tool.
• Introducing Cloudflare One - "It provides secure, fast, reliable, cost-effective network services, integrated with leading identity management and endpoint security providers."
• zheap - "zheap is a way to keep table bloat under control by implementing a new PostgreSQL storage engine capable of running UPDATE-intense workloads more efficiently."
• Rails multitenancy story in 11 snippets of code - Sketching out an approach based on PostgreSQL schemas.
• Announcing HashiCorp Waypoint - "A consistent developer workflow to build, deploy, and release applications across any platform."
• Avo - A new alternative to ActiveAdmin, though some features are a paid upgrade.
• What is expected of a Engineering Manager? - An overall framework for thinking about the job.

• Setting Up Cypress, Rails, and CircleCI - You don't have to use capybara.
• Less status updates, more coaching - One-on-ones really shouldn't be for status updates.
• Basic Concepts in Unity for Software Engineers - A primer for those who dream of moving to game development.
• Sentimental Versioning - "Sometimes a version is just a number, but sometimes what we really want is a poem."
• The Case against Low Priority Alerts - If you don't care, why are you alerting?
• Announcing HashiCorp Boundary - "Simple and secure remote access — to any system anywhere based on trusted identity."
• API pagination design - Maybe we should rely on cursors instead of offsets.
• ungoogled-chromium - "Google Chromium, sans integration with Google"

• Getting noticed as a remote engineer – and why it matters - Some ideas on being more visible to the rest of the team.
• The Engineering Leader’s Guide to Cycle Time. - Free ebook from Code Climate.
• Vapor - "Vapor is an OFFCHAIN Bitcoin protocol for building a decentralized web by "Bitcoinizing" HTTP requests. In essence, it's a protocol for authenticating and wrapping HTTP requests inside Bitcoin transactions, making it possible to replicate HTTP requests across multiple interested parties in a trustless manner."
• The Complete AWS Lambda Handbook for Beginners (Part 1) - An introduction to serverless.
• Last Resort Font - A way to at least guess at what type of character is missing from your Unicode rendering.

• I built a lay-down desk - The DIY approach to a fancy workstation. I'm tempted.
• Kube DOOM - "The next level of chaos engineering is here! Kill pods inside your Kubernetes cluster by shooting them in Doom!"
• Product Prioritization from Founders to Team of Teams - In my experience, small companies don't think enough about process change when they grow.
• Monolith -> Services: Theory & Practice - Kent Beck supplies some wisdom.
• Developing For The Semantic Web - It's been on the verge of taking off for decades now.
• screego/server - "It allows you to share your screen with good quality and low latency. Screego is an addition to existing software and only helps to share your screen. Nothing else."

• What's in a JWT (Json Web Token)? - Deciphering an important part of web infrastructure.
• Jasper - "A flexible and powerful issue reader for GitHub"
• pg_dump_anonymize - A tool for anonymizing PostgreSQL dump data.
• React is Dead. Long live Reactive Rails! Long live StimulusReflex and ViewComponent! - Some of the current sweet spots in application building. If I was writing a greenfield app I'd probably head in something close to this direction.
• Privacy Badger Is Changing to Protect You Better - Refinements to this privacy tool are a good thing.
• How To Keep Your Mental Health in Check When You Work From Home - Worth a read in this time of pandemic.

• Anbox - Run Android applications on Linux.
• Darling - "Darling is a translation layer that lets you run macOS software on Linux." They're edging up on GUI support.
• Building the perfect, cheap DIY NAS - Network attached storage without proprietary hardware.
• Delegation creates career progression - A key skill as you move beyond the front line.
• Product Roadmap First Principles - "By the way, a bunch of features does not constitute a product, and a list of features doesn’t make a product roadmap."
• Bye-bye, Apple - As I survey a desktop of half-working computers, moving from Mac to OpenBSD on a ThinkPad sounds increasingly attractive.

• Startup Hiring 101: A Founder's Guide - "This guide is for early-stage startups who have raised enough money to hire their initial team."
• NestedText: A Human Friendly Data Format - An attempt to do better than YAML or JSON.
• Concise Encoding - And another attempt, this time with a binary wire format and a human-friendly display format.
• Xen on Raspberry Pi 4 adventures - "To our surprise and astonishment, the Raspberry Pi 4 was the very first platform to have physical addresses different from DMA addresses"
• Reader Mailbag: AWS Services - "A lot of AWS billing models tie directly to things that are impossible to calculate in advance."
• Neuron 1.0 released - "Neuron is a note-taking tool based on Zettelkasten, that aims to be future-proof, and is optimized for publishing on the web."

• Tool Tip - The Change Compass - A simple technique for judging team health.
• Social Cooling - An argument that too much data sharing has many bad side effects. I agree, though I assume we'll just continue to make things worse.
• Writing a book: is it worth it? - If you sell a hundred thousand copies, sure.
• How to make video calls almost as good as face-to-face - Steps you can take at a variety of price points.
• Ruby one-liners cookbook - Who needs a command shell?
• Understanding How UUIDs Are Generated - Ever wonder if they're really unique?
• CyberChef - "CyberChef is a simple, intuitive web app for carrying out all manner of "cyber" operations within a web browser. These operations include simple encoding like XOR or Base64, more complex encryption like AES, DES and Blowfish, creating binary and hexdumps, compression and decompression of data, calculating hashes and checksums, IPv6 and X.509 parsing, changing character encodings, and much more."
• Hetty - Free HTTP toolkit for security research.

• Recognize your management wins - It's easy to remember your big mistakes, but they're not your whole management story.
• Wireflow - Open source code for creating user flow prototypes.
• I was wrong. CRDTs are the future - Decentralized distributed editing trumps server-centric models.
• How to Fix PostgreSQL Performance Issues with PG Extras - Spotting and fixing common problems.
• Terraspace - "Terraspace is a Terraform Framework that optimizes for infrastructure-as-code happiness."
• Code scanning is now available! - On GitHub, that is.
• SSH configuration: ssh_config - Useful options in your configuration file.
• Ruby 2.7.2 Released - With 100% fewer deprecation warnings.

• How to deliver a remote training with code-katas and randori in pairs - Working to deliver effective training in the time of pandemic.
• TS-SQL - "This is a SQL database implemented purely in TypeScript type annotations."
• Workers Durable Objects Beta: A New Approach to Stateful Serverless - In beta from Cloudflare.
• How We Facilitate Remote Team Health Checks at Atomic Object - Facilitating a session of safety to check in.
• Life beyond the cargo cult - Using RSpec in a Test Unit fashion.
• An Unofficial Active Admin Guide - Things to make life easier when you use this gem.
• Before You Start Coding - A pre-flight checklist for developers.
• Microservice Architecture Without Microservice Overhead - Inventing the "microlith".

• Strategies for Remote Mentorship - Transitioning an in-office workflow to lower bandwidth.
• duf - "Disk Usage/Free Utility (Linux, BSD & macOS)" with colorful output.
• Are Estimates Ever Helpful to Developers? - Getting better at estimating makes other stakeholders trust you more.
• In defense of XML - It is better defined than YAML or JSON.
• Five Years of Remote Work - Some of us were working remotely long before 2020.
• kitty - Terminal emulator that offloads rendering to your GPU.
• Ideas from my Development Setup: Always Tmux - Making sure you have tmux available in every bash session.
• Actionsflow - "The free IFTTT/Zapier alternative for developers to automate their workflows based on Github actions"

• Rails Monolith towards Engines spike - Our story - Sometimes the monolith remains the best solution.
• Don’t make yourself redundant - Be careful when adding a layer of management.
• Things I Was Wrong About: Types - A former believer in "types are basically useless" recants.
• My new coding workflow: VS Code + Remote-SSH extension - Using the cloud as your main development location.
• Tridactyl - "Replace Firefox's default control mechanism with one modelled on the one true editor, Vim."
• Cloudflare Radar - Monitoring internet traffic trends.
• How To Reject Engineering Candidates - Without being a jerk, that is.
• Rails procedure design pattern - Organizing a multi-step process.