It started with me moving most of my written content from big platforms. Hence this website. The second, and lot more important for me, was liberating my e-mail. I have been a GMail user for a very long time. It’s an amazing product, making a lot of the hard stuff seem easy and natural. But unfortunately, it’s run by Google and it’s just scary how much of our online life is controlled by them nowdays. Long gone are the days of “Don’t be evil”.
I wrote a short post for the Reflex Capital blog about what you should do with free credits you get from your cloud provider. I have seen startups struggle with this more than once.
Czech version also available.
Determining the order of events in a distributed system isn’t straightforward, as the concept of “now” is relative. This article explores the challenges of achieving consensus in distributed systems and why relying on proven algorithms like Raft or Paxos may be essential.
One of the editions of Resilience Roundup, which is a newsletter dedicated to the topic of systems resilience, compiled by Thai Wood, talks about a paper from MIT’s Nancy Leveson called “The Role of Software in Spacecraft Accidents”. In this paper, the author studied five prominent disasters in aerospace industry with relation to software. Thai Wood does a much better job of summarizing the paper than I would, so I will not go over the whole paper here. Go read the newsletter linked above. I’d just like to focus on three of the themes written about in the paper.
At Reflex, we are using Samepage as our central communication tool. We send an occasional e-mail here and there, but most of our Powerteam agenda is covered by Samepage these days. But that was not always the case.
In the past, apart from in-person meetings, we used an e-mail group and it was, for the lack of better terms, madness. The issues we discuss are fairly complex. An e-mail might spark three separate topics for discussion. An answer to one question could raise two new. After few rounds of e-mails, we usually gave up and postponed the discussion to our next team meeting.
My motivation for writing this post is twofold.
The first one is easy to explain. I just want to draw your attention to the wonderful piece of art which is the painting La Trahison des images (The Treachery of Images) by belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. I am not much of a painting person myself, to be honest. But the work of René Magritte somehow resonates with me and I consider myself a fan. There are many of his paintings I like, but The Treachery of Images is one of my all time favorites.
Bitcoin is often being described as digital gold. Same as gold, it is scarce and being mined and released into circulation at a fairly predictable rate. It is impossible to counterfeit. It is fungible, meaning some gold is not better than any other gold. It is divisible to a high degree. It can be anonymous.
It has most of the properties of gold, but improves them. It’s much easier to transfer, for one. Which means it is also easier to steal large quantities of. If you steal a ton of gold, people will notice when you try to carry it with you on the plane. If you steal 100 million worth of Bitcoin, you can carry it in your head or on a USB stick.
I have been running my website at taborsky.cz for more than twenty years now. At the beginning, I hosted everything myself, just because there was no other way. I hand-crafted my HTML, or used PHP for some simple templating to automate it.
As the years progressed, I started using third party services for posting my articles. First Blogger from Google, later Medium. These things were a massive upgrade. I especially liked Medium’s simplicity and focus on the content.
Wrote another article for the Reflex Capital blog: ICO or IKO about why I think ICOs make little to zero sense.
Czech version is also available, as usual.
I published an article on our Reflex Capital blog about how we think about technology scalability, when we consider investing in a company. It’s not just about those thousands of requests.
Czech version is also available.
