Books

This month I read two books: Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems by Niall Richard Murphy and Architecting for Scale by Lee Atchison. Both about similar things, both are very useful, but each of them uncovers the topic of stable and scalable systems from slightly different perspectives. I can definitely recommend it to everyone who cares about the quality of their internet services.

Programming, technologies, computer science

• Last time when I had to solve the problem of 1M simultaneous socket connection, I was completely unprepared. In this article, Daniel Kleveros shares his experience of work with 600k concurrent WebSocket connections on AWS using Node.js. There are many insides and specific server/infrastructure settings described.
• Controversial results of the research prove that the Bitcoin price spike up to $19K was the result of speculation of one account.
• Hard to classify this article. I don’t know is it about technology, society, management, or anything else. Anyway, welcome into the new epoch of surveillance. In China, some companies and government projects used special equipment to read brain waves of their employees. It tracks the brain activity, the focus of the employee, emotional spikes. It helps them detect employees who are distracted or tired. The next step will be probably translating brain waves into the text. Here is an example of such research. Orwell’s world became closer every day.
• Three levels of infrastructure maturity. In a few words:
  • easy level (infrastructure as a code, CI/CD, load balancing, tracing requests through services);
  • medium level (centralized logging, monitoring agents, auto-scaling, ability test on 1% of traffic);
  • hard level (blue-green deployment, anomaly detection

Management, Startups, Marketing, Productivity

• I am a big fan of using mindmaps in business analysis. Here is an example of another one approach of using it for the initial project discussion. Standard 5W mindmap put project discussion in a well-structured way, cover essential aspects before you plunge in discussing details.
• One more useful article is about 9 types of requirements documents