Welcome to Sleepless Links! This is my (sometimes) weekly collection of things that I’ve read recently that I’ve found interesting and thought-provoking. Hopefully you find some of them worthwhile as well!
Here’s the curated list of links for the week ending June 26th, 2022:
Crypto is first up this week, largely because of the recent major downward movements in BTC price but also because it seems that the tide of sentiment may be slowly shifting. I’ve never really understood the reasoning behind what I believe to be an irrational exuberance around blockchain tech - those most adamantly talking about it and supporting it seem way too invested (both figuratively and literally) to be objective. A pair of posts for this week shows a contrast worth noting. First, a post by Matthew Green In defense of crypto(currency.) Matthew is a cryptographer and professor at Johns Hopkins University, so one could rightly assume some objectivity, but I don’t really see it. As a follow-on, Bruce Schneier rebuts Matthew’s post in On the Dangers of Cryptocurrencies and the Uselessness of Blockchain. This side of the argument just makes more sense to me.
Lots of chatter this week about Walmart and the way they are approaching cloud. One post that covers it pretty quickly is Walmart outlines cloud strategy to investors from CIODive. It’s an interesting approach, but I’d assert that Walmart is only able to do what they’re doing as a result of their scale. This isn’t a viable strategy for the average enterprise. There’s a more on-depth article about it in the WSJ, but it’s paywalled.
Similarly, I came across a similar (but slightly older) post about Target’s multicloud approach. Again, Target’s scale is what I believe to be the enabling factor here. I’d love to hear more about their private data center plans. They’re described in the article as a sunk cost, but at what point will they cut the old baggage loose? It’s not like you put money in once and never have to spend any more to keep them viable.
This short post by David Linthicum on Why governance is critical to cloud success scratches the surface of a topic that I’ve been engaged in lately in my day job. The word “governance” is often considered in a pejorative sense, as in “I couldn’t meet my delivery date because of the governance hoops I needed to jump through.” The fact remains though that there does need to be at least a foundational set of guardrails around cloud use. This will likely turn into a full blog post before too long.
Last up this week is a learning link. I’ve yet to go through the whole thing, but the Developer site on Google has some really good technical writing courses that every engineer should go through, even if they’re not writing technical documentation as a predominant function of their role.
That’s it for this week - happy reading!
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