Posts
Security and Obscurity
An oft-repeated guideline in securing technology is that we should not rely on obscurity to secure our systems. As we wind down 2023, I use this article to take a brief look at that guideline.
more⇛Hiatus Almost Over
A quick update and explanation why I’ve missed the last two months’ posts: We’ve moved from Illinois to the Pacific Northwest of the US. With all the planning, moving, driving, waiting for stuff to show up, etc., I held off on doing any more blog posts for the duration.
I expect to resume posting monthly in December.
more⇛Support Open Source
Last week brought a little bit of drama to the dotnet development community. The popular open source testing framework Moq briefly moved out of open source and into shareware without much warning. Daniel Cazzulino, the maintainer of Moq, has already indicated the next generation of Moq will have some form of commercial license. The way it was done was inelegant but the reason was all to common: Cazzulino decided he needed more financial support to continue. While I think he could have handled it better, I don’t blame him — we all have bills to pay. The lack of financial support for people who maintain key software is an understated risk in the modern software landscape. Every organization which builds or uses modern software is relying on a massive ecosystem of open source software (OSS). Most enterprises do zero to help those OSS teams who in turn rely on people who are basically volunteers.
What do we expect a volunteer team will do when they are looking at their own bank accounts and realizing the extra hours they put in for free are making other people money? What happens when they conclude that they can’t really support this free product and work a full-time job to pay the bills? What are they to do when they reach the back nine of middle age and discover their retirement prospects don’t look great?
more⇛Choosing Tools to Make Your Life Harder
In this article, I discuss some of my thoughts on how tools can make some tasks harder while making others easier and what it means for our organizations. I also go into why adopting a tool that makes some tasks harder may not be all that bad and touch on a strategy or two for managing these tools. I’m considering this a first public draft rather than a final article. I am curious how you all see it.
more⇛Unselfish Tasks
Your team has a list of tasks that need to get done. How do you decide who does what? It seems simple on the surface but as soon as you start thinking about it, it becomes more and more daunting. This time around, I’ll discuss how I prefer to do it and why. Hint: it doesn’t start with just assigning everything and hoping it gets done.
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