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2026.05.15 Link Dump
Learning Software Architecture
- Reading Alex’s concrete recommendations at the bottom of the article — there are some fun resources that might be worth their own link dump entry in the future.
- The narrative around agentic coding is pushing the idea that turnaround time is a developer’s top priority. “You don’t need to understand the code, just let the AI fix the bugs later”
- This inverts a traditional developer priority list, that maybe one of the top priorities for a developer is building and maintaining a mental model of the system they are responsible for.
The Five Levels: from Spicy Autocomplete to the Dark Factory
- This article frames the agentic coding narrative very well. Not sure if we’ll all end up at level five (the dark factory), but that’s definitely where the hype is pointing!
Mechanics of talking. Must-have soft skills of Solutions Architect
- Remember to smile
- Running an effective meeting (e.g. having a plan)
- Communicating information: visual communication; chunking items, etc
- Confidence
- Invite someone from your team to join you and support
- If you are surprised, say you will get back with the answer later because you need time to think it through.
A Nostalgic Tour of Electronics
Lately I’ve been decluttering, and I went through some old boxes of electronics components. This hobby was a significant part of my childhood. Some kids collected pokemon cards, other kids watched cartoons… I tinkered with electronics.
The decluttering project is partially a desire to reduce the space the items take up in storage and partly a trip down memory lane. There were many positive aspects to this hobby. I created a science fair project, I entertained myself during the cold Minnesota winters, and I practiced some of the same troubleshooting and analytical skills that I use today in my job as a software engineer.
At the time, my dad was a physics professor and had a shelf full of electronics books, so it was also a way to connect with Dad. I kept an engineering notebook and right now I have in front of me a page about RC circuits in Dad’s handwriting. 2 pages later I have a circuit diagram I made of how a 12-key keypad button could be wired. I wanted to know how everything worked, and I collected magazine articles and made meticulous component lists complete with prices from the DigiKey catalog.
One interesting notebook entry is from 2010 in which I was a little more reflective and wrote:
I find that I am very covetous of other people’s projects. I have a lot of stuff to hack — a whole closetful — but I don’t use it very often. … I like hacking projects that are useful. I don’t really like the art ones.
Reading this I can tell I had a very strong pragmatic bent even back in 2010. I still have this bent today, but lately I am finding that it stifles creativity to always be trying to find a practical use for everything. At the same time, I also realize I have a “whole closetful” of ideas and limited time so I have to prioritize which things to work on. It also seems helpful to bring projects to a point where they can be shared or published about. In doing so, you are forced to distill and express what you learned.
It is a challenge for me to deal with the collection of components due to the memories attached to them. I sold a couple items on eBay, and I suppose the thing to do is to take the remaining components and either auction them as a lot or donate them to a maker space.
You are what you buy?
Recently I have slipped into thinking I am defined by what I consume. For example, if I buy this REI shirt that will make me more of an outdoors person. Or if I found a clever deal for a bike rack on Craigslist, it will show the world how frugal I am and make me more of a biker. Or if I wait to buy a new TV, that shows that I have self-control and am not going beyond my financial means.
I also start zeroing in on what I will buy in the future. I spend a lot of time curating shopping lists, or finding the right reviews, and trying to decide whether I will buy a thing this month or next month based on my budget.
This is silly. My identity is not defined by what I buy, when I buy it, or whether I had good self discipline. I think I have been too much focused on how these exterior things define me.
Instead, I want to focus on things I create, adding value to the world instead of just consuming value. So for example, at work, I should be getting my projects done on time, and creating value by collaborating with my coworkers effectively. At home, I can create value by caring for others in a sacrificial way. I can create value by writing blog posts, or by being a good steward of things I already own. I want to have a vision for the future that is defined by how I will be faithful to God, not by how I will be faithful to my budget.
Learning in the midst of information overload
We live in a world where we are easily inundated by information. Our news feeds constantly update, providing an endlessly scrolling list of tidbits. There are always more Youtube videos, more podcasts, and more articles in our feed readers.
My own story roughly matches this. In the past I tried to cull my list of subscriptions: follow the right people on Twitter and unfollow the ones who tweeted too much. I tried to save time by only clicking on the interesting headlines. Ultimately I found that I still couldn’t keep up, and I was afraid of missing out on what I wasn’t clicking on.
The main mistake is “trying to keep up” in the first place—or having this passive, feed reading behavior be your only way of learning new things. Reading Twitter is a good way to keep up, but it shouldn’t be the only professional development that you do. Sure, it might help you discuss the latest ideas with your coworkers at lunch, but it’s also not going to go very deep for actually improving your professional skills.
Active Learning
“Stop Passive Learning. Start Active Learning,” by Andrea Angela was the original impetus for me to write this blog post. The main point of the blog post is to stop endlessly consuming news feeds, because it leaves you constantly feeling behind. Then you have free time, and this allows you to choose a topic to learn, and then look for resources around that topic.
I like that Angela acknowledges that we won’t always have the mental capacity to do “active learning,” and that it is at those times that he turns back to his news feeds in a more passive approach.
Another blog, “Improve Your Self-Improvement” has a similar idea. Don’t just learn something and then set it aside. Share what you learned with others.
Ratio of producing to consuming
After I read about active learning I immediately remembered John Sonmez’s video about the 70-30 rule. This rule talks about the ratio of consuming to producing. Spend 70% of your time producing and 30% of your time consuming. Producing is making value for others, and consuming is just a passive activity where you are looking to be entertained or “informed” but you aren’t actually using that information.
When I think about the 70-30 rule I think of several contexts where I am producing and consuming.
At work, I probably do follow this ratio. In the work context, I would associate producing with tasks like coding, debugging, documentation, and giving demos. I would associate consuming with things like reading my email, checking out the work news feed, and reading the all-company announcements and stuff.
The other context is my after-work work, a term borrowed from “Improve your Self-Improvement” meaning professional development or personal development that is career-related that you do on your own time. In this context, I am striving to move more toward the 70-30 ratio. Some producing tasks include writing blog posts (yay, doing that right now), or taking notes, or coding on a side project. Some consuming tasks include watching Pluralsight, reading my RSS feeds, or other articles I come across on Twitter.
In conclusion, I want to be more proactive, and come up with my own ideas, rather than trying to react and digest others’ ideas all the time. I want to have my own opinions about what is important to keep up with in the tech industry, rather than just assuming that the newest thing is important to me.
Computer security reading list (part 2)
I came across Bruce Schneier’s “CRYPTO-GRAM” many years ago when it was an email-only newsletter, and ever since then I’ve been interested in security. Taking St. Cloud State’s Computing Ethics class (CSCI 332) gave me more connections with how security affects computers.
Continuing my last post, Computer security reading list (part 1), this post includes some resources on computer security. Not that I’ve read everything linked to here, but I’ve read enough to be drawn in and informed. I hope that you may find these useful as well.
Blogs (continued)
- Google Project Zero Project Zero is a team at Google that looks at different systems and finds and documents zero-day vulnerabilities.
Articles
- Anatomy of an exploit – inside the CVE-2013-3893 Internet Explorer zero-day – Part 1 “Create 10,000 items in the current web page, giving each one a title string of ‘3333….3333’.” This reminds me of the tweet about the QA Engineer.
- So Long, And No Thanks for the Externalities: The Rational Rejection of Security Advice by Users (PDF), Cormac Herley, 2010. “Users’ rejection of the security advice they receive is entirely rational from an economic perspective.”
- Introducing the “Secure Account Management Fundamentals” course on Pluralsight “I mean I’m going to use SHA1 with a salt so yeah, I’m going to hash it.”
- Wikimedia Foundation MediaWiki: Application Penetration Test (PDF) “iSEC identified a total of fourteen issues, including two of high severity. Most of the high and medium severity vulnerabilities are related to data validation and allow for various common attacks including XSS, DoS, and CSRF.”
Lectures
- Offensive Computer Security (Florida State University) “Hacking vs. penetration testing, what’s the difference? PERMISSION.”
Computer security reading list (part 1)
Blogs
- Schneier on Security Bruce Schneier writes about the privacy and policy implications of security.
- Krebs on Security Brian Krebs focuses on security that targets the consumer, whether through fraud or data breaches.
- Troy Hunt Troy is Microsoft MVP for Developer Security. He writes about do’s and dont’s of good application security from a developer’s perspective.
- Matthew Green’s “A Few Thoughts on Cryptography Engineering.”
Books
- Security Engineering: A Guide To Building Dependable Distributed Systems, Ross Anderson. “Security engineering is about building systems to remain dependable in the face of malice, error, or mischance.”
- Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It, Marc Goodman
Talks
- TED: The security mirage, Bruce Schneier. This one is suitable for a general audience. Good explanation of modeling threats, risk perception. Not just computer security.
- TED: Fighting viruses, defending the net, Mikko Hypponen
Reports
- Verizon 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report Click “Get Full Report,” then find the small “Download Only” link in the corner to avoid giving up your contact information
- Mandiant APT1 Report (PDF) “Exposing One of China’s Cyber Espionage Units”
- OWASP Top Ten “The OWASP Top 10 provides a list of the 10 most critical web application security risks.”
Three weeks with a smartphone
Three weeks ago, a shiny new Galaxy S4 arrived in the mail. I purchased the Samsung Galaxy S4 GT-I9500 32GB (unlocked) on eBay. The phone was released about a year ago, but I found a vendor who was selling it new. When it arrived, it had Android 4.3 on it. Recently, an update arrived to my phone for Android 4.4, an OS which by now is 6 months old.
Initial setup
There were a lot of questions and informational boxes, both from Samsung and Google. I was a little overwhelmed. Later on, I went back into the different apps and looked more carefully at the settings.
Many apps I used on my iPod were also available on Android. I installed Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, ESV Bible, Olive Tree, Springpad, Pleco, Webster’s dictionary, Google authenticator, MPR Radio, and Crashplan. A few apps I had not been able to use on the iPod, because they only supported iOS 6 and higher. This list included Amazon MP3, and Bandcamp, though I don’t use either of them often. Apps I installed that were not on iOS include Firefox and F-Droid, which I’ll talk more about later.
Comparison with iOS
Before owning the Galaxy S4, I owned a 3rd generation iPod touch for 2 years. It wasn’t a phone, and it didn’t have a camera, but it did a lot of the things a smartphone does, provided I was in wifi range. I installed a number of apps and used Apple’s included apps as well. When I bought the S4, I had to get used to the differences in the user interface.
Some physical differences that stuck out to me:
- Don’t rest your thumb on the bottom edge of the phone, you’ll bump the back button. I had to get used to holding my Android differently than my iPod touch.
- The sleep button is on the side instead of on top, which means that there’s no side to rest the phone on when it is horizontal. Which buttons do you want to mash if watching a video in widescreen?
- The sleep button also becomes a shutdown menu if you long press it (same as the iPod), but the definition of “long” is much shorter on Android. I’ve seen that menu way too many times.
Some software differences:
- Rearranging icons on the home screen is much different.
- Launching apps and going home feels slower on the Galaxy S4. This is a little disconcerting, considering the S4’s hardware is 4 years newer.
- Two different photo apps: Photos and Gallery. Apparently Google is trying to shift over to Photos.
- The lock screen clock widget is inaccurate half the time. The little numbers in the upper right are always right, but the big numbers aren’t always right. This is unacceptable.
- I like not having to install iTunes in order to transfer music on the phone.
- Apps live in two places: In the Apps list (shows all your apps), and possibly on your home screen (where you can add widgets, arrange to your heart’s content)
Overall, iOS feels more integrated. Apple has had more time to refine their product. The lock screen clock widget and the apps living in two places are excellent examples. Another example is system updates. For Android, when you get an update depends on the device you’re using and which carrier you have. For iOS, you get the update when it comes out.
On the other hand, Android is much more customizable. I installed F-Droid, a 3rd party app store with only open source apps in it. So far I’ve installed KeePassDroid, SatStat, and FillUp from it. It makes my inner free software person happy. You can also install custom keyboards, root your phone, and even replace the firmware, things I haven’t yet been adventurous enough to do.
If my readers have any thoughts about iPhone vs. Android, I would welcome them in the comments.