Four short links: 13 July 2018
Technology Change, Rebuild Warnings, Google Cloud Platform, and Vale Guido
- Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change (Neil Postman) — a 1998 talk that just nailed it. (1) culture always pays a price for technology; (2) the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are never distributed evenly among the population; (3) every technology has a philosophy that is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards; (4) A new medium does not add something; it changes everything; (5) media tends to become mythic. (via Daniel G. Siegel)
- Five Red Flags Signaling Your Rebuild Will Fail — No clear executive vision for the value of a rebuild; You’re going for the big cutover rewrite; The rebuild has slower feature velocity than the legacy system; You aren’t working with people who were experts in the old system; You’re planning to remove features because they’re hard.
- Good, Bad, and Ugly of Google Cloud Platform — informative, and well-written—e.g., While GCP services exhibit strong consistency, I can’t always say the same thing for the documentation.
- Guido Takes “Permanent Vacation” as Python’s BDFL — prompted in part by a particularly contentious language change proposal. I don’t ever want to have to fight so hard for a PEP and find that so many people despise my decisions. I would like to remove myself entirely from the decision process. […] I’ll still be here, but I’m trying to let you all figure something out for yourselves. I’m tired, and need a very long break. Thanks for your years of service, Guido.
