Sten Vesterli's Blog

Making IT Live up to its Promise

Backup Communication Channels

IT Leadership, , , ,

What is the difference between 30 individual soldiers and a platoon? Leadership and the ability to communicate.

The first step in your resilience planning is to ensure that you can still communicate, even when faced with an onslaught of Russian hackers or American government officials.

That could mean an on-premise open source mail server and a basic web server. Every workstation and company smartphone could have a separate open source mail client and web browser preconfigured for those servers.

There are many other options – the paranoid and those with high threat levels might have spare phones running GrapheneOS and Briar, or even establish their own Meshtastic mesh network.

If you don’t have a backup communication channel, you urgently need to establish one. Especially if you are outside the U.S. and depend on U.S. services.

Could, not Should

Spiritual Programmer,

There is nothing you should do. There are any number of things you could do.

Our language affects our mental state, and there are some insidious words you must be on the lookout for. One of them is “should.” Whenever you use that word, it indicates that you are allowing an ill-defined social norm to push something onto your plate. It stays there, taking up valuable mental space, but you never get around to it. Because it is not really your goal.

That is why “I should lose weight” invariably fails. If you made New Year’s resolutions, how are you doing with them? If you accidentally formulated any of them as “should” goals, you’ll find you haven’t made much progress.

The alternative word is “could.” I could go running each week. It is totally possible. I might decide that other things in my life are more important, and not go running. But “could” empowers you. You could start writing a book today. You could decide to only eat one donut today. But there is nothing you “should.”

Book Review: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Book review

An interesting view at the man behind so much of the news. Definitely not a hagiography. Like in his also excellent Steve Jobs biography, Walter Isaacson seems to have had very good access to the man and the people around him, and to give an unbiased account of what he hears. For many contentious episodes, he reports how Elons sees it and how the other party sees it, and leave you to draw your own conclusions.

After reading this book, you come away with a better understanding of Elon Musk and his way of thinking. Some of his philosophy is useful – like “The Algorithm” for simplifying everything. Other parts of his mindset, like his approach to other people, should not be emulated.

Recommended.

Hike Your Own Hike

Spiritual Programmer,

You can learn a lot from long-distance hiking. One of the life lessons I took from my 1,800 km on the Pacific Crest Trail is HYOH – Hike Your Own Hike.

We’re always comparing ourselves to others. Today, presented with an endless stream of carefully curated social media feeds, it can more than ever seem like everybody else is living a better life.

That’s why it is important to live your life the way you want. On the trail, some travel ultralight, using their trekking poles to stretch a small tarp over their lightweight sleeping bag atop a thin foam sleeping pad. I travel with a real tent, a good air pad, and a warm sleeping bag. They move faster than I do, but I am more comfortable. Long-distance hikers all accept the HYOH mindset – the ultralighters are not judging me for my heavy pack, and I am not envious of their higher mileage.

Live your own life.

Rational Decision-making

IT Leadership, ,

As an individual, you are free to make emotional decisions. You can decide to evict some software product from your laptop because you don’t like the vendor’s nationality or stance on today’s hot-button social issue. As an IT professional, you can even set up an open source solution that does almost the same (though invariably with worse UX) in a few days.

But as an IT leader, you are expected to make rational decisions. That’s why you don’t throw out all your Amazon, Microsoft, or Google Cloud on a whim because you are unhappy with U.S. policy. The rational choice is to minimize your risk. That means building new systems outside U.S. clouds so you don’t add to your problems. And migrating away from disfavoured platforms in an orderly, cost-effective manner.

Measuring Productivity

IT Leadership,

How do you measure productivity? The research suggests that, with AI tools, perceived programmer productivity increases, while objective productivity decreases. In addition, maintainability decreases as more of your code base has never been seen by the human sent in to clean up the AI-generated messes.

That should indicate that we need to prove a massive increase in productivity to justify the use of AI tools. But how to measure it?

Lines of Code (LoC) was already a bad measurement. In the days of AI, it is a totally random measure, and a higher LoC might just as well indicate a decrease in functionality as an increase.

If you’re in the big enterprise/government world, you might use Function Points or Use Case Points. If you are running Agile, you can use team velocity (within each team). Ideally, you would measure business value. Unfortunately, few organizations can articulate and calculate the business value of their IT.

If you want to argue that AI tools increase productivity, you need to put a number on the productivity you claim to increase.

Meet People in Real Life

Spiritual Programmer, ,

Your happiness, health, and longevity are strongly influenced by the strength of your relationships. You need to meet people in real life – online connections have only a small fraction of the effect of meeting someone face to face.

If you live alone, it is even more important to take your social connections seriously. Over time, unless you continually work to renew your relationships, they will weaken. If you don’t have any close relationships, cultivate some. Join a sports club or volunteer in an organization. Doing something physical together with someone is an easy first step to building a relationship.

Did you meet with friends or family this week? If not, make plans to meet someone this weekend.

Sovereign Cloud

IT Leadership, , ,

You need to create a delay between a foreign government ordering your cloud provider to cut you off and the actual cutoff. The longer you can make this period, the better. The new AWS European Sovereign Cloud (ESC) is Amazon’s way of offering this. That is a cloud solution running on hardware in Europe, staffed by Europeans, organized under a European daughter company.

That does not protect you against Amazon being compelled by the U.S. government to hand over your data, but all important data should be protected with keys you hold, outside your cloud provider, anyway. But it does make it likely that AWS Europe would contest an order to shut down the service, and that AWS Europe employees would not cut you off at the whim of a foreign dictator.

Because the probability of this happening is still “Rare” (edging towards “Unlikely”), you do not need to act on this risk now. But it is prudent to ensure you have time to react if it should happen.

The Power of the Mind

Spiritual Programmer, , ,

You can think yourself healthier. Scientists have just published another placebo effect study, this time showing increased vaccine effectiveness. The people who did positive thinking exercises showed increased antibody production after 14 and 28 days.

The inverse is that you can probably also think yourself sicker, though for ethical reasons this has not been studied.

Make sure you have a technique for getting yourself in a better mood. For some, it can be uplifting music. For others, it might be a walk in nature. Spend a few moments identifying something that energizes you. And then do it today.

Risk Evaluation

IT Leadership, ,

Do you have a paper map in your car? No, why would I need that?

If you are a Verizon customer in the U.S., you were just reminded. A large chunk of their network was down for half a day, leaving frustrated customers depending on their atrophied geographical memory. Verizon says the culprit was the usual botched network upgrade, not evil hackers. Some Europeans are better prepared, having routinely been subjected to Russian jamming of GPS and Galileo navigation.

When was the last time you revisited the risk evaluation of your critical systems? The threats are changing and increasing, and your risk evaluation from one year ago no longer applies.