• Saturday: ran errands, visited the Columbia employee store where they were having a Memorial Day weekend sale with some cool rock climbing walls outside for the little dudes and face painting inside (if you’re into that kind of thing). Smallest dude made it halfway up the 40 foot wall, super fun, made me think I need to buy a portable rock wall.
• Sunday: drove out to Manzanita to hang out with family, made a couple of dutch oven recipes (BBQ chicken and berry cobbler) for dinner after playing at the beach for hours. Beautiful day at the coast after the clouds burned off.
• Monday: got rid of an old stove and an old trash compactor in about 30 minutes on Craigslist (amazing how quickly free stuff disappears), found the old chicken flock a new “home” (guessing they’ll actually be eaten) on Craigslist as well, cleaned out the old coop, lined it with rocks, lunch at Five Guys and then made some corn bread in the dutch oven in addition to an amazing potato salad out of Bon Appetit and a kale / avocado salad from the CSA we’re a part of for dinner.

• Come for the tool, stay for the network | cdixon blog
  Quote: "…initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company"
  (categories: growth business network kindling )

• Medium is not a publishing tool — The Story — Medium
  Lots of good stuff, the highlights and responses features are really nice additions.
  (categories: blogging commenting responses highlights medium )

• You are Thinking of Your Career Trajectory Wrong | cek.log
  Quote: "… you should not measure your career in terms of a things like scope, money, or seniority on the Y-axis of a ballistics graph. Instead you should measure your career on the missions you undertook, the places they took you, and what you learned."
  (categories: advice career jobs work )

• Students – Guide to Technical Development – Google Careers
  Great list of work for someone wondering what to tackle next.
  (categories: google learning development career school )

Time flies, has been almost four months since my last weekend post. Mother’s Day weekend so…

• Saturday: Better half said she wanted a stove for Mother’s Day, I had bookmarked some stuff by BlueStar Cooking months ago because it looked cool, there’s a local distributor here in town that we visited on Saturday after the oldest’s soccer game. Great warehouse / storefront but nothing seemed to fit us. Lunch at Guero to go and a table inside at Jive on the 5th floor on a beautiful sunny day in Portland certainly fit us though. Came home and got the boneless lamb roast (purchased from Ponderosa Provisioners in Beaverton, highly recommended) started and then dug rocks out of the parkway strip (apparently that’s what it’s called?) for a couple hours (decorated with river rocks, has slowly filled with dirt and leaves over the past years and looks like a pile of dirt instead of something nicely maintained).
• Sunday: Mom got to sleep in, I made breakfast, she wanted “super greens” and a fried egg, tried these directions on for size, worked out pretty well. Got the lamb in the oven at 1pm, finished work on the rocks with Grandpa, got the potatoes in the oven while the lamb was resting, put together a really great salad with this dressing (doubled the recipe for the four of us and we had a bunch left over), sourdough bread procured, sliced and toasted and had dinner outside. Lamb was fantastic, we had two five pound legs while the recipe called for one 10-12 pound leg so I probably should have cooked it less (was at 141 degrees after 3 hours, should have been at 130 to 135) but the 500 degree toast at the end to crisp up the skin was a nice touch.

• Everything We Wish We’d Known About Building Data Products – First Round Review
  Quote: "Where to Start Building: A lot of people choose to start building by modeling the product in question. Some start with feature discovery or feature engineering. Others start with building the infrastructure to serve results at scale. But for Belkin, there’s only one right answer and starting point for a data product: Understanding how will you evaluate performance and building evaluation tools. “Every single company I’ve worked at and talked to has the same problem without a single exception so far — poor data quality, especially tracking data,” he says.“Either there’s incomplete data, missing tracking data, duplicative tracking data.” To solve this problem, you must invest a ton of time and energy monitoring data quality. You need to monitor and alert as carefully as you monitor site SLAs. You need to treat data quality bugs as more than a first priority. Don’t be afraid to fail a deploy if you detect data quality issues."
  (categories: data quality testing bigdata linkedin twitter information )

• Dan Fredinburg | LinkedIn
  Died in the Nepal quake, quote from linkedin: "Additional Honors & Awards Boeing’s Air Force Systems Team of the Year Award 3rd Place – 2005 Took 1st Place in Google’s DWH/BI Lasertag competition – 2008 Won 1st Place in a Foosball tournament (teams) – 2009 Set Pop-a-shot Basketball record score of 157 – 2009"
  (categories: life love death values awesomeness kicking-ass )

• Dropwizard JDBI | Dropwizard
  Quote: "If you’re using JDBI’s SQL Objects API (and you should be), dropwizard-jdbi will automatically prepend the SQL object’s class and method name to the SQL query as an SQL comment…" OMG that’s really useful if you happen to be like me and have spent too much time in Postgres slow query logs.
  (categories: postgres database dropwizard java tips )

• Meet DJ Patil: Obama’s Big Data dude
  Quote: "In each new feature, Patil drove home the idea that the best sign of a good data product is no obvious evidence of the data itself. “The user doesn’t want to see raw data, they want the data in a usable form, and that usable form should help them do something more creative, be more efficient, give them superpowers,” he said. “Something you could never conceive of before.”" What a great story too.
  (categories: data visualization value problem-solving grit government )

• A Conversation with Werner Vogels – ACM Queue
  On services before microservices were a thing. Also note that this was written in 2006(!) and that Jim Gray (since lost at sea) did the interview: "The traditional model is that you take your software to the wall that separates development and operations, and throw it over and then forget about it. Not at Amazon. You build it, you run it. This brings developers into contact with the day-to-day operation of their software. It also brings them into day-to-day contact with the customer. This customer feedback loop is essential for improving the quality of the service."
  (categories: amazon soa microservices wernervogels )

• Don’t Take Micro-Services Off-Road | Dejan Glozic
  Quote: "If you carefully read ‘monolith to micro-services’ blog posts, you will notice that the end result is the same thing. Groupon team has not created a ‘catalog of social coupon services to be assembled into coupon applications’ – they rebuilt Groupon Web site. They broke the monolith into small pieces and rebuilt it again. As far as their end users are concerned, the monolith is still there – the site was rebuilt in mid-air."
  (categories: microservices architecture soa groupon paypal soundcloud netflix )

• EFF creates the "Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents" | Electronic Frontier Foundation
  Awesome.
  (categories: patents software law innovation )

• Prioritization and Value Maximization | Tyner Blain
  Math applied to the effort / value matrix.
  (categories: agile planning value strategy )

• 8 Questions You Need to Ask About Microservices, Containers & Docker in 2015
  Great list of issues that have to be addressed if / when you use microservices.
  (categories: microservices docker )

• CTO Chris Satchell on Nike’s Continuous Delivery Strategy — Heavybit Blog
  A couple of good nuggets here as we move down this path: a) Quality is not a gate, it’s an ongoing operation b) Make Release Management about process verification: verify the process for release, not the release itself.
  (categories: continuous-dev nike devops microservices )