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Christine Kawano Usyak is an education professional with experience teaching, leading, and mentoring at organizations as diverse as Apple, Amazon, and a first-grade classroom. In this episode she and Morris talk about leading adults vs. kids, mentoring and being mentored, finding focus, and work/life balance. First, though, we talk about a question that mixed-race people can find themselves getting asked dozens of times a day: “Where are you from?” Show Notes“A mission to capture the full range of half-Japanese experience — in 192 photos,” an excellent article by Louise George Kittaka in the Japan Times about the Hāfu2Hāfu project.International School (Wikipedia)iPhone X (Wikipedia)2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (Wikipedia)What’s the origin of the phrase “raise the bar”? (Quora)“Why Stack Ranking Is A Terrible Way To Motivate Employees”, a 2013 article by Max Nisen in Business Insider.“Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace”, a 2015 article by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld in the New York TimesAesop (Wikipedia)
Super special US-based guest corespondent Courtney Mitchel returns to discuss an incident this summer where a San Francisco startup decided to no longer host a neo-Nazi website on its global CDN. Show NotesHurricane Harvey (Wikipedia)Hurricane Katrina (Wikipedia)“George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” protest song by The Legendary K.O: (Listen) (Wikipedia). See also “Hell No We Ain’t All Right!” by Public Enemy: (Wikipedia) (YouTube)Saffir–Simpson scale of hurricane intensities (Wikipedia)Why We Terminated Daily Stormer, on the Cloudflare official blog.Cloudflare CEO admits that removing neo-Nazi site because he’s in a ‘bad mood’ is a slippery slope (CNBC)Exponent 121: The Uber Mutation, where Ben and James discuss Cloudfare and the Daily Stormer incident.What The Alt-Right Wears And Why (Nylon)Facebook real-name policy controversy (Wikipedia)Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men From Hate Speech But Not Black Children (ProPublica)Does Even Mark Zuckerberg Know What Facebook Is? (New York Magazine) Relevant, but published after we recorded.‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia (The Guardian) Relevant, but published after we recorded.Exponent 79: Twerk the Algorithm, where Ben and James discuss an early ill-fated attempt by Facebook to improve the quality of news on their platform.Information wants to be free (Wikipedia)The Internet is making us stupid, a decade-old interview on Salon with some surprisingly relevant insights on the effect of technology on discourse.The Case for Reparations, by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic.Richard Rorty’s 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming (New York Times)Refusing to Tolerate Intolerance, by Julia Serano on Medium.Paris Hilton’s Dogs Have a Nicer House Than You Do (See Photos) (People)Backups with Restic, A Raspberry Pi, and a 4TB HDD (morimori.tokyo)Friday’s Widespread Internet Outage in Japan (morimori.tokyo)
Super special guest Doug Mak (Website) (Twitter) joins us for a conversation about startup life, coming to Japan, the advice people give you, and Uber at a turning point. Show NotesPivotalJapan Taxi AppConnpassDoorkeeperJLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test)BJT (Business Japanese Proficiency Test)Hacker News Tokyo meetupFacebook Changes Its ‘Move Fast and Break Things’ Motto (Mashable, 2014)Livedoor (Wikipedia)Livedoor challenges Japanese approach to capitalism (New York Times, 2006)Start-Up Spirit Emerges in Japan (New York Times, 2013)
Sergio returns to discuss a presentation about incident management that he gave at the Tokyo Rubist Meetup. (Apologies about the poor audio quality.) Show NotesSlides from Sergio’s presentation ‘Do Not Panic!’Tokyo Rubyist MeetupChapter 14 - Managing Incidents of Google’s excellent Site Reliability Engineering book.The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code. Step 1 is “Do you use source control?”Scaling your API with rate limiters on the Stripe Blog“The number one priority if you loose communication with your team is to reestablish communication with your team.” - Joel Spolsky at around 9:00 on the excellent, excellent Episode 36 of the Stack Exchange Podcast ‘We Got Hit by a Hurricane’Reddit: Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job…Discussion of the above on Hacker News
For the second episode of Season 2 extra-special US-based guest corespondent Courtney Mitchel joins Morris for a wide-ranging discussion of work and labor. Show NotesA clip of Ronald Reagan in Bedtime for Bonzo (1951)Some of the best episodes of Accidental Tech Podcast are when they (despite some initial reluctance) talk about gender and sexism in tech: Episode 57, Episode 58, Episode 116, Episode 117, etc.John Siracusa and Casey Liss talk about misspeaking on sensitive and charged subjects in Episode 57, a discussion followed quickly by Casey unintentionally misspeaking.Harajuku Data Lake Episode 2: Why do we work?Indiana’s anti-LGBT law, signed by then-Governor Mike PenceNo I don’t want to “be a man”: 15 Problems Only Butch Lesbians Understand (Cosmopolitan)A Schmierkase/“Cup Cheese” recipe. There are surprisingly few results for “Schmierkase” online, and most seem to be on personal blogs, forgotten forums, or minor recipe sites that appear to have last seen a redesign in the early 2000s.Incidentally, this is sort of how the web felt in the mid-90s: Many small independent sites, lots of quirky and amateur graphic design, search engine results where the most interesting link was just as likely to be on the fifth page as the first, and a sense of hope and excitement that came from knowing that you–yes you!!!–could make the #1 schemierkase site in the world in just a few hours on a weekend. (Being the 1990s, it would almost certainly be called “Schemierkase World,” have a rotating 3D globe on a beige background as the logo, and be hosted on GeoCities with a WebRing on the splash page.)The ACA (Affordable Care Act), also known as ‘ObamaCare’ (Wikipedia)‘Too big to fail’: Systemically important financial institution (Wikipedia)An excellent description of the post-World War II ‘lifetime employment’ system in Japan. While this system did begin to break down in the 1990s, even in 2017 many of its features (and particularly the practice of hiring new graduates en masse based on their perceived future potential rather than what they may or may not have studied in college) remain fully intact.Bachman Turner Overdrive - Lookin’ Out for No. 1 (YouTube)Converse closing Chuck Taylor All-Star plant [2001]Nike sweatshops (Wikipedia). Two decades after the peak of the anti-sweatshop movement of the mid-1990s, Michael Hobbes offers an excellent review of its legacy, successes, and failures: The Myth of the Ethical Shopper.Shit Out of Luck (SOL)(Wiktionary)Ben Thompson and James Allworth’s excellent podcast ExponentCron (Wikipedia)Basic income (Wikipedia)“Could ‘single-payer’ be Trump’s trump card?,” an incredibly optimistic opinion piece that appeared in the Baltimore Sun in January. At this point the answer is clearly ‘No.’“Can we cure all diseases in our children’s lifetime?”
Welcome to Season 2!!! This week extra-special guest Jerrika Mizrahi (Facebook) (Twitter) (Instagram) (YouTube) joins Morris to answer one not-so-simple question: How do you play 90s games on a modern TV? It’s a retro console and retro cable extravaganza!Show NotesRu Paul’s Drag RaceHigh-dynamic-range video (Wikipedia)Super Nintendo (Wikipedia)PlayStation 2 (Wikipedia)PlayStation 3 (Wikipedia)PlayStation Vita TVPlayStation 4 Pro (Wikipedia)Sega Saturn (Wikipedia)Sega Dreamcast (Wikipedia)ファミコンミニ Famikon Mini (Engadget)NES Classic Edition aka ‘NES Mini’PlayStation 1 (Wikipedia)Nintendo Switch (Wikipedia)PerfidiaJerrika’s incredible modded SNES:Steve Jobs and the back of cabinetsUpscalersXRGB-mini FRAMEMEISTERChun-Li (Street Fighter Wiki)Anti-Anti-AliasingN64 Anti-AliasingSCART connector (Wikipedia)RGB 21-pin connector (Wikipedia)RCA connector (Wikipedia)BNC connector (Wikipedia)Coaxial cable (Wikipedia)10Base2 (Wikipedia), Ethernet over coax cables with BNC connectors.S-Video connector (Wikipedia)D connector (Wikipedia)VGA connector (Wikipedia). Morris incorrectly refers to this as a ’d-pin connector,’ perhaps because it’s a “15-pin DE-15 connector.”Dreamcast VGA Box (Wikipedia)The Toro connects to a Sega Dreamcast and has both SCART and VGA outputs.List of Dreamcast homebrew games (Wikipedia), including a number of tiles released in 2017 (!)Jeff Atwood on TIS-100, an assembly language programming game. Recent discussion on Hacker News indicates that the TIS-100 architecture is in some ways similar to the GreenArrays GA144.This American Life Episode 284: Should I Stay or Should I Go? has an excellent story about golden masters.John Siracusa talks in depth about game controller design on Episode 49 of Hypercritical, “Pinching the Harmonica.”Season 1 of Ru Paul’s Drag Race was shot with very, very soft-focus.N64 UltraHDMIComputer History Museum (Silicon Valley)The Living Computer Museum (Seattle) maintains a number of historical systems in working order. In fact, they’re even online! You can request an account to log in remotely here.Information Processing Society of Japan Computer Museum is an excellent (albeit online only) source of information about historical Japanese computer systems.
For the final episode of Season 1 Morris and Sergio look inward—what was this experiment, and how did it go? SPOILER ALERT: Production has already started on Season 2!Show NotesUsing iTunes to encode podcastsMorris’ MacBook: MacBook (Retina, 12-inch, Early 2015)An episode of DATABASE, the show whose name inspires ours. Great vintage clips of Bill Gates and Kazuhiko Nishi.Thanks again to Alex for creating our logo art and Shun of Picotune fame for composing our theme song.Marco Arment’s massive podcasting microphone reviewMorris records with a Pyle-Pro PDMIC58 mic attached to a TASCAM US-2x2 USB audio interface.Sergio records with a Sony ECM-PCV80U mic with a build-in USB audio interface.Rogue Amoeba’s Piezo, used to record Skype audio for the podcastAudacity audio editorHugo, the static blogging engine that powers our website and RSS podcast feedOvercast, Marco Arment’s podcast appSoftware Engineering Daily, one of the best technology podcasts aroundBen Thompson on Facebook and engagement
In this week's episode, Morris and Sergio chat about security: Sergio's background in security, pen testing, the evolution of security threats, security auditing, defensive practices, careers in security, and recent developments.Show NotesFollow us on Twitter!Like us on Facebook!Rate us in iTunesSubscribe in OvercastChanging your Windows 3.1 Wallpaper. Incidentally, this is what the web looked like in the 90s: Loud colorful repeating background images, completely nonstandard navigation, strange text colors, a simple list with no context, and a link (‘unzip’) pointing directly at an EXE file on an FTP server.Intros are tiny demos. A couple modern 4k intros. 1kb JavaScript intros.Animate (YouTube) was the 4k intro that blew Morris’ mind in 1995. He never imagined his 386 PC was capable of realtime 3D animation, let alone that it could be produced by a 4KB executable.Black hat (Wikipedia)Stuxnet (Wikipedia)Evolution of Security Threats (PDF) The first five slides of this presentation provide an excellent overview of how security threats have evolved.Zero day (Wikipedia)Hacking Team (Wikipedia) A cybersecurity firm that has been criticized for providing surveillance tools to oppressive governments.Black Lives Matter organizers monitored by a cyber security firm (Mother Jones)Penetration test (Wikipedia)Chaos Monkey (Netflix)HJDL Episode 7: IoT SecurityIntent to Deprecate and Remove: Trust in Existing Symantec-Issued Certificates (Hacker News)Let’s Encrypt and Phishing SitesCeci n’est pas une pipeMacBook Pro’s new Touch Bar is powered by iOS (Cult of Mac)“The hidden dangers inside the platform” by Mickey Shkatov & Jesse Michael (YouTube). Two security researchers from Intel demonstrate a hack targeting an LTE modem inside a tablet.Behavioral Game Theory in Defensive Security (SlideShare) by Kelly ShortridgeGoogle’s Project Zero
What is management? In this week's episode, Morris and Sergio discuss personal task management, management in corporate environments, no fewer than ten different genres of management tools, and our personal experiences with managing different types of organizations. Show NotesStand-up meeting (Wikipedia), featuring the wonder graphic captioned “A stand-up in the computing room”GeekbotAgile software development (Wikipedia)Scrum (software_development) (Wikipedia)Extreme programming (XP) (Wikipedia)Test-driven development (TDD) (Wikipedia)Behavior-driven development (BDD) (Wikipedia)Lean software development (Wikipedia)Kanban (development) (Wikipedia)JIRA Software (Atlassian)AsanadapulseGantt chart (Wikipedia)Wardly Maps: Topographical intelligence in businessThe Art of WarYou Are Here: Personal Geographies and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon (YouTube), one of Morris’ favorite books:-)CloudcraftOKRMorris’ MacBook - quite fast, silent operation, and surprisingly cheap to buy used.Manifestación on Wikipedia (Spanish) is linked to Demonstration (protest) on Wikipedia (English)Quakers
This week Morris and Sergio chat about security and privacy in the context of the Internet of Things (IoT). Show NotesInternet of Things with Azure’s Steve Busby on Software Engineering DailyIPv4 (Wikipedia)IPv6 (Wikipedia)General Data Protection Regulation (Wikipedia)David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) on Google Home advertisingHackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway—With Me in It by Andy Greenberg in WiredInternet of Shit (Twitter)Hugo Teso - Going Deeper on Aviation Security (Youtube). A different take (Quora)Plain Text Offenders, a site documenting sites that appear to be saving passwords in plain text. They should be doing Salted Password Hashing.Haunted by Data, referenced in the context of PII as “toxic waste”Data from connected CloudPets teddy bears leaked and ransomed, exposing kids’ voice messagesAndrew Huang has a lot of great content on intellectual property in the Shenzhen ecosystem. Start with The $12 “Gongkai” Phone and Episode 3: A New Breed of Intellectual Property (part of a WIRED Documentary).Apache KafkaAmazon Kinesis
This week Morris and Sergio discuss our experiences with job interviews, both as candidates and as interviewers. Morris shares some stories of applying to companies in Japan as a new graduate, and Sergio explains why Spain is like Vietnam.Show NotesTopgrading (Wikipedia)The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing by Joel SpolskyFinding Great Developers by Joel SpolskyOn Interviewing Programmers by Jeff AtwoodAgainst The Whiteboard by Anil DashWhy Can’t Programmers.. Program? by Jeff Atwood
This week Morris and Sergio discuss Google's announcement of a successful collision attack on the SHA-1 cryptographic hash function. Show NotesCloudbleed and SHA-1 Collision with Max Burkhardt An excellent discussion of the topic on Software Engineering Daily.Shattered.it The branded marketing site for this research result. The actual paper is here.Cryptographic hash function An excellent Wikipedia article on the topic.FNV (Fowler Noll Vo) hash function (Wikipedia)Bloom Filters An excellent introduction by Jason Davies.SHA-1 Broken A very informative piece by Bruce Schneier from 2005 (12 years ago!). His take on the current announcement: “This is not a surprise.”Year 2038 Problem (Wikipedia)HMAC (Hash-based message authentication code) (Wikipedia)Linus Torvalds on how the SHA-1 collision announcement affects git. A more cynical take on the situation.
In our longest episode yet, Morris and Sergio discuss serverless the architectural concept and Serverless the open-source framework. Show NotesCagpie.net Shun Kobayashi’s portfolioPicotune Shun’s chiptune-style MIDI player and piano roll visualizer, hand-coded in vanilla JSServerless Architectures by Martin FowlerServerless, the company and the frameworkStackOverflow: Lock, mutex, semaphore… what’s the difference?Serverless Framework with Austen Collins on Software Engineering DailyThe Docker Weekly newsletter
In Episode 3 Morris and Sergio discuss Docker. Things go a bit off the rails around 23:00, but hang in there! By 37:00 we're back on track for a strong ending segment. Show NotesWhat is Docker?Blue Green Deployment - A post by Martin Folwer. Not mentioned directly, but important in the context of our discussion around deployment. Follow the links to Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration.DEVOPS: DEFINED!!!1! - A breathless post by HashiCorp and the source of our “Monitor/Deploy/Secure/Provision/Package/Test/Build” chant.MesosphereDocker Swarm
In our second episode Sergio and Morris discuss work, jobs, and careers. Show NotesPostmortem of database outage of January 31
In the inaugural episode of Harajuku Data Lake, Sergio and Morris discuss GitLab’s production database incident of January 31, 2017.Show NotesGitLab Team HandbookGoogle Doc: GitLab.com Database Incident - 2017/01/31Discussion on Hacker News