Tuesday’s musings

👩‍🏫 Is it safe to send the kids back to school? That’s a question that Katerina and I have been grappling with ever since our son’s kita opened back up again here in Germany. It’s a very delicate balance between the risks of COVID-19, mental health, and the amazing things our son learns every day when he’s at school.

🥱 On the other hand, my son and I had a long conversation about why he’s absolutely bored at school while we were on our way there this morning. He’d be happy playing video games all day, instead.

🌥 Basecamp’s Hey is running ~90% of their compute on spot instances via Kubernetes pods, including the entire front-end stack and the bulk of their async background jobs. Very cool.

⛈ May 12th was a bad day at Slack. Laura Nolan has written up the story of how a failure in updating the state in Slack’s HAProxy layer led to progressive deterioration of the service.

🎍Growing trees to sequester carbon is a good idea. Replace trees with bamboo that you can harvest repeatidly, and you get a pretty great idea: the ability to continually grow material for to make engineered construction material for buildings that has the potential to have a sizable impact on our carbon footprint. A great listen from Asim’s Climate Fix podcast talking to Rizome.

🍎 Even though recipients of Apple’s new Developer Transition Kit machines aren’t supposed to talk about their performance, DTK performance test scores are starting to show up. Very little credence should be given to these as applies to the machines that will come as it’s an iPad based CPU in them, but the results look pretty good considering.

💣 Unlike most of the past twenty years, I haven’t immediately installed macOS 11 or iOS 14 on any of my devices. Yet. I’m sure the time will come sooner or later where I’ll bring them up on a test device.

👋 Have a great Tuesday!