Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: A third-party Instagram app causes ructions, remote work causes office slump, and more on Cali’s salary transparency law. (more…)
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: I’m devoting my entire column to new ways of working. Whether it’s remote work, enforced hybrid working or a four-day working week, let’s triage the trends and futz with the future.
Too many managers are stuck in their old ways. Despite the success of pandemic-era WFH, they yearn for how it used to be. But that ship has sailed.
Mark Gurman: Apple Sets Return-to-Office Deadline
“Pushing employees back into the office”
The company … set a Sept. 5 deadline [and] will require employees to work from the office on Tuesdays, Thursdays and a regular third day that will be determined by individual teams. [It] has been working toward getting its employees back in the office since at least June 2021, when it first announced the three-day policy.
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The iPhone maker has been one of the most stringent technology companies when it comes to pushing employees back into the office, irking some staffers. … An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
It “Shows the Company Hasn’t Learned Anything,” cries Jason Aten:
“Not the same thing as actual collaboration”
Right now, every company is trying to figure out how to get its employees back to the office. Despite the fact that the world did not, in fact, come to a stop over the past two years. … Many companies—especially Apple—had their best two years ever when most of their employees were working from home.
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Apple SVP of software Craig Federighi … told employees in an email … he “can’t wait to experience the special energy of having all of us back in the office together again!” … I imagine a lot of the people who work in the software organization are wondering whether that “special energy” actually makes them more productive—or if it’s just a thing managers feel as they watch employees.
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If we’ve learned nothing else from the pandemic … coming to the office doesn’t make them more productive. It might make managers feel better … but that’s not the same thing as actual collaboration.
But WFH doesn’t suit everyone. Here’s Aunty’s Kate Morgan: Why workers just won’t stop quitting
Anthony C Klotz, a professor of management at University College London’s School of Management who coined the term “Great Resignation” [says] in addition to the original push factors … the reasons people are resigning have diversified. … Some workers are now swapping jobs that require them to be present in the workplace for remote positions. Other workers … are leaving remote jobs for ones that have a larger in-person component.
WWSJD? quonset knows:
Regardless of the jerk he was, Steve Jobs had grand visions which he brought to fruition. … One thing he stressed was the personal connection and serendipitous encounters.
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It’s why, before he died, he was arms deep in the design of Apple’s headquarters. He wanted people to bump into each other, he wanted interaction between different groups. It’s why it’s designed the way it is. People are funneled to certain areas and have no choice but to interact with others.
Is there an unintended brand consequence? u/Latinhypercube123 demonstrates there might be:
Hahahaha. Apple is such a dead end company now. They’ve literally become what they ridiculed IBM of being: Corporate monolith of sameness.
But is there a better way? You should read Evelyn Yu: Bank Says Four-Day Week Is The ‘Future of Working Life’
“Flexible work is here to stay”
Six months after switching to a four-day working week, the UK’s Atom Bank said it’s seen benefits from talent retention to improved productivity. … Days lost to sickness fell over the period and customer service ratings also improved.
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Even as the pandemic recedes and some bosses push for a return to the office, there’s increasing evidence flexible work is here to stay. Office vacancies in central London are at the highest level in more than 15 years.
Not just in the UK—it’s in Canada too. Here’s Sean Davidson:
“Huge impact on employee retention”
Ross Wainwright, CEO of Alida, said the software company implemented four-day work weeks for its 500 employees at the start of June and the two-month trial wraps up this week: … “The early results are fantastic. … The employees are clearly happier. … This is about getting better balance for our employees and helping to invest in their mental health.”
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He said the trial is also having a “huge impact” on employee retention. … The most “unanticipated” result of the trial was how empowered his employees told him they felt, knowing the company trusted them to get the job done with a reduced schedule: “We empowered the employees to get the work done within their schedule.”
Also in Toronto is u/SuperChloe:
We had similar results at my company when we initially trialed 4-days (also not longer days, still 9-5) — overall increased output/productivity and employee satisfaction. We’ve moved to permanently having a 4 day work week.
Meanwhile, @AnnaLovesVoting is just fine with a hybrid schedule:
I don’t need 100% WFH, I’m willing to go to an office 1 maybe 2 days a year.
You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.
Image: Carles Rabada (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week, a remote/hybrid work special: Bribes to relocate you, Fridays are forgotten, and big tech firms stop building offices. (more…)
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Bluesky—Twitter’s research spinout—opens its ADX algorithm, Irish data center electricity worries grow, and Apple employees are the latest to rise up against hybrid working. (more…)
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: The first silicon for Wi-Fi 7, Google’s search quality “is” failing, and what Severance tells us about The Great Resignation. (more…)
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: No remedy for banned Facebook users, new ARM-based VMs on Microsoft Azure, and The Great Resignation will still be a Thing for the foreseeable. (more…)
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Linode gets bought by Akamai, Firefox market share is “measly,” and Google brings staff back to the office.
First up this week: Why is Akamai buying Linode? Whatever the reason, it’s a big payday for its solitary shareholder: Not far off a billion dollars.
The 100 lb gorilla of edge computing and CDNs is promising not to mess with Linode’s winning open source cloud formula: No change, steady as she goes, etcetera. But how many times have we heard that before?
Here’s local scribbler Paige Gross: Linode’s $900M acquisition by Akamai is a ‘game changer’
A household name in the Philly tech scene … CEO Christopher Aker founded the company in 2003, and it’s been bootstrapped ever since, growing to about 250 employees. … Aker has owned 100% of Linode since he founded it.
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Aker said the deal brings the company closer to solving evolving challenges “as cloud services become all-encompassing, including compute, storage, security and delivery from core to edge. … We’ve been talking about ‘alternative cloud’ — alternative to the big guy — and now we’ve sort of validated ourself in this market.”
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The Old City company maintains “well over a million accounts” but has anywhere around 150,000 active users of its platform at any particular time. Linode’s HQ, the bank building at Third and Arch Streets, remains. … For clients and Linode employees, there won’t be too much noticeable change [Linode] says.
Why does Akamai want Linode? Jonathan Greig asked the CEO:
Akamai CEO Tom Leighton [explained] that Linode has great customer support and is already in 11 locations, which Akamai is going to “dramatically” expand. … Leighton also noted the September 2021 acquisition of Israel-based Guardicore, a cybersecurity company that offers a micro-segmentation solution to reduce the potential attack surface of corporate networks, secure applications, and meet compliance standards.
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According to Leighton, the company is expecting the cloud compute category — which includes edge applications, its net storage business, and Linode — to reach “well over half a billion dollars in 2023. … We were pioneers in edge computing and now we’re taking a big step forward in cloud computing with Linode.”
But here’s a worried-sounding zoid.com:
Well good for them but I hope [Akamai] don’t screw it up. Linode is a great hosting company.
Last week, a journalist innocently asked, “Is Firefox OK?” And people lost their minds.
We need Firefox and Gecko. A Chromium monoculture is bad for the web and bad for DevOps. (Before you ask: No, the existence of WebKit doesn’t change things, thanks to Apple’s ridiculous policies). Much as I tried to say something nice about Firefox last month, its market share is, frankly, pathetic.
Matt Burgess: Is Firefox OK?
In the two decades since Firefox launched from the shadows of Netscape … the browser has slid to less than 4 percent of the market—on mobile it’s a measly half a percent. … Its fate also has larger implications for the web as a whole.
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Each year Google pays Mozilla hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties. … In its 2020 financial results … Mozilla listed its total revenue as $496 million. … The Google-Mozilla deal was last renewed in 2020 and is expected to expire in 2023. … Mozilla and Firefox acknowledge that for its long-term future it needs to diversify the ways it makes money.
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Firefox still matters: … The browser market is dominated by Google’s Chromium codebase and its underlying browser engine, Blink. … Microsoft’s Edge Browser, Brave, Vivaldi, and Opera all use adapted versions of Chromium. Apple [has] its WebKit browser engine [but] other than that, Firefox’s Gecko browser engine is the only alternative.
Firefox, how do we love thee? Let not_count_zero count the ways:
I still use Firefox because:
a) I remember Internet Explorer and the standards wars. …
b) I don’t trust Google. …
c) Most sites work well.
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I do have questions though. … They’re currently getting around a half a billion‽ What are they doing with it? … This seems really off—really, really off.
But heed a deeply worried Thom Holwerda:
The decline and potential demise of Firefox is a massive problem that everybody seems to be kind of tiptoeing around—too afraid to acknowledge that if Firefox were indeed to disappear, we’d be royally screwed. We’d end up right back where we started 20 years ago, with Chrome being the new IE6.
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The situation is especially dire for … Linux users, developers, and distribution makers. … Gnome Browser or KDE’s Falkon can barely be taken seriously, and … are based on Apple’s WebKit, which isn’t a great position to be in.
Google is planning “celebrations” to welcome back employees after being fully remote. And in practice—unlike at IBM—this doesn’t mean a vaccine mandate.
It was just three months ago that Google said it “firmly stands behind our vaccination policy.” What changed? It’s unlikely to have been due to a tiny minority of staff publishing a manifesto.
Jennifer Elias: Google relaxes mandates
The company will no longer require vaccination as a condition of employment … as it prepares to bring workers back to the office … at least three days a week for a “hybrid” work model. … The company [had previously] told employees that they must comply with vaccine policies or they’d face loss of pay and eventually loss of employment.
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According to Google spokesperson Lora Lee Erickson … the company dropped the requirement … after removing the Jan. 18 deadline it had set for employees to either get vaccinated or get exemption approval. She declined to provide further details on the policy or the reasons for the reversal.
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Google Real Estate and Workplace Services VP David Radcliffe [said Google] is preparing to begin its 30-day transition period to the hybrid work week if conditions continue to improve. He said his team is planning “celebrations” to welcome back employees. … Unvaccinated employees who are approved to enter offices will still need to follow additional protocols, including testing and wearing a mask.
It’s too simplistic to say the anti-mandate brigade are also anti-vaxxers. For example, raxxorrax:
I am vaccinated and HR knows this. … But if they officially demanded a certificate, I think I would have called it quits. Many people don’t have that option [but] there are consequences for such unreasonable demands.
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I understand a mandate for vaccinations in certain occupations relating to health. It is something you have to personally accept if you want to work in the field.
Although a few others are way over at the end of the bell curve. Greg Jinkerson:
Don’t get excited, [Google is] still evil and stupid. … Now they’re backing down for some reason, [but] this is barely anything notable as far as a rollback of restrictions. [It] is not any kind of encouraging news.
You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.
Image: Aleksey Kuprikov (via Unsplash; leveled and cropped)
Think! Welcome to Big Blue Week here at The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: IBM’s employment practices scrutinized, IBM z/OSaaS breaks cover, and IBM encourages staff back to the office.
First up this week: IBM’s defense in an employment age discrimination lawsuit looks to be shredded. Internal emails “appear to show high-level discussion about paring the ranks of older employees.”
According to one of the plaintiff’s lawyers, unnamed “top IBM executives were explicitly plotting with one another to oust older workers … to make room for millennial employees.” On the face of it, they seemed to be doing the polar opposite of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act.
Noam Scheiber: Making ‘Dinobabies’ Extinct: IBM’s Push for a Younger Work Force
Top IBM executives were directly involved in discussions about the need to reduce the portion of older employees … sometimes disparaging them with terms of art like “dinobabies.” … Documents made public by a Federal District Court … show executives discussing plans to phase out older employees.
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The newly unsealed documents, which quote from internal company emails … show top IBM executives specifically emphasizing the need to thin the ranks of older workers and hire more younger ones. [One] email refers to IBM’s “dated maternal workforce,” an apparent allusion to older women, and says: “This is what must change. They really don’t understand social or engagement.”
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Adam Pratt, an IBM spokesman, [claimed,] “IBM never engaged in systemic age discrimination.” [He] said that some of the language in the emails “is not consistent with the respect IBM has for its employees” and “does not reflect company practices or policies.”
Yikes, ageism and sexism? Experienced staff are valuable, says MrBanana:
I did some time at IBM [and] remember being invited to a meeting with a new group, headed by a new “thinker,” who had something to present to myself and a colleague. We walked past the foosball table to the meeting room. Naturally the room had no chairs, and was covered in multi-coloured Post-it Notes. Once they had gone through their mood boards and the non-linear presentation of this new idea, I turned to the other old geezer in the room. “Didn’t we look at something like this 8 years ago?”
“Yeah, we worked out that compute power just to run the UI for one session wouldn’t be available for a couple of decades.” The children were somewhat disappointed, and (fortunately) we were never asked back to their romper room.
But experience can be both a blessing and a curse, learned aahortwwy:
I experienced both sides of this in five years at a company in hypergrowth. … I learned so much at that job: … In year 1, I was determined to accomplish X and ignored the skeptical comments of some colleagues who’d been at the company longer than me. I failed and wasted some time. In years 4 and 5, new colleagues were determined to accomplish X and ignored my skeptical comments.
“Mainframe” is not a dirty word. It’s secure, vertically scalable, and it put the VM in VMware. Now, what IBM Wazi did for on-prem LPARs, Wazi aaS promises to extend to hosting z/OS instances.
Mainframes and cloud-native DevOps need not be incompatible. To modernize legacy apps using hybrid cloud instances for dev/test—and even prod—can be a big productivity boost. But isn’t it weird that IBM spun out its mainframe-as-a-service zCloud offering only a few months ago?
Mike Vizard: IBM Shifts Mainframe App Testing to the Cloud
While many workloads over the years have been migrated off mainframes or simply retired, the applications that run on z/OS today are still among the most mission-critical that organizations run. … IBM this week revealed it has added the ability to set up testing environments on the IBM Cloud for z/OS mainframe applications.
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IBM plans to make IBM Wazi as-a-Service (Wazi aaS) for z/OS generally available in the second half of this year, [which] will enable DevOps teams to self-provision an instance of a z/OS virtual server on a secure private space running on IBM Cloud. … At the same time, it will become easier to modernize mainframe applications by making them more accessible to other applications via a set of secure APIs … using a cloud-native set of DevOps tools that run in a Kubernetes environment.
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Modernizing mainframe applications is a less complicated endeavor than migrating them. The challenge is that building, deploying, maintaining and securing all the APIs required to do so represents a significant amount of effort.
OK, boomer, why are we talking about 1960s mainframes on devopsy.kinsta.cloud? Here’s ArchieBunker:
Mainframes are different beasts altogether, almost alien when you compare them to PC hardware. You have binaries written for the S/360 system in the 1960s? Good news you can still run them natively without a recompile.
You think virtualization and containers are a hot topic? IBM was running multiple OS instances inside a VM in the 1970s. … The engineering is incredible.
But z/OSaaS? It’s déjà vu time for Beleagured Greybeard:
“Cloud Managed Services for z” AKA “zCloud” has been around for over 10 years. … IBM offloaded it with the Kyndryl spin, so its odd that they now want to re-invent it.
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If it’s a strategic platform, why didn’t they hold onto it instead of spinning it off to Kyndryl? Sounds like yet more daft leadership decisions.
IBM wants to “keep employees safe” as they return to office work after being fully remote. In practice, this means a vaccine mandate.
Although there are exemptions on medical or religious grounds, IBM has promised to place dissenters on unpaid leave. As you might expect, the policy has a few employees up in arms.
Cassie Werber: How Salesforce, IBM, and HSBC are approaching return to work
When the pandemic hit, and IBM moved 95% of its workforce to fully remote, it was pleasantly surprised to discover no drop in productivity. … Still, they planned to return to offices.
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The company saw this as a way to keep employees safe. … One example … is its development of the IBM Digital Health Pass as an alternative to vaccine cards or paper vaccine certificates, which they use to make sure all the staff that come into their offices are vaccinated.
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Arvind Krishna, IBM’s CEO, meanwhile came up with what he called the IBM Work From Home Pledge. [It] included commitments to flexibility, kindness, sensitivity to family, setting boundaries, and acknowledged video fatigue. It concluded with a commitment to “be connected.”
Tricky to “be connected” if you’re not allowed back in the building. Anne D’Innocenzio, Heather Hollingsworth, Tali Arbel, Mae Anderson, Ken Sweet, Matt O’Brien and Dee-Ann Durbin:
IBM software engineer Justin Albano said his company recently notified employees that it would be revoking badge access to workers who aren’t vaccinated or haven’t proved that they are. “We’re not able to enter an IBM office at this time,” said Albano.
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He said some workers have successfully sought religious exemptions but “my thought process was I shouldn’t have to explain to my company my faith” to get out of a policy that’s “immoral in its foundation.”
What’s the alternative? With a perspective, it’s Chris Haney:
Or, get the vaccine. Protect yourself and the people around you. You people really are detached from reality.
You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.
Image: Marcin Wichary—cc:by; leveled and cropped (ask your parents)
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: iMessage lock-in lessons, attrition-rate fixes, and more on Mozilla.
First up this week: The weekend story getting the technorati chattering was about how Apple iMessage denizens pour scorn on Android users—identifying them by their “icky” green chat bubbles. An iPhone user’s message gets a “proper” blue background, y’see.
Amusing though the story was, the writer seemed to be hell-bent on proving some sort of Apple C-suite-led “conspiracy to lock in.” The reality is far more mundane—but it teaches important lessons for DevOps.
Could your DevOps team make a trivial engineering decision that pays unexpected dividends? While lock-in might be distasteful, seemingly irrelevant design or technical choices can have huge ramifications with users.
Tim Higgins: Why Apple’s iMessage Is Winning
[The] pressure to be a part of the blue text group is the product of decisions by Apple executives starting years ago that have … helped to cement the iPhone’s dominance among young smartphone users. [It] encourages people to pay the premium … and remain loyal to its brand.
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Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable. … Jeremy Cangiano, who just finished up his MBA, … tried to cash in on it last year by selling his own merchandise that touted, “Never Date a Green Texter.”
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The blue iMessage bubble was born out of a simple engineering need, according to Justin Santamaria, a former Apple engineer who worked on the original feature. … The idea that it would keep users locked in to using Apple devices wasn’t even part of the conversation at the time, he said.
And then the other shoe dropped—via Ron Amadeo:
Google took to Twitter this weekend to complain that iMessage is just too darn influential with today’s kids. … The company is hoping this public-shaming campaign will get Apple to change its mind. [But it] probably has the least credibility of any tech company [because it] has released 13 half-hearted messaging products since iMessage launched in 2011.
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Google … seems to have learned nothing from its years of messaging failure. Today … the situation is an incredible mess, and no single Google product is as good as Hangouts was in 2015.
Ouch. With a sociological perspective, here’s Christina “filmgirlcw” Warren:
iMessage is incredibly popular with certain demographics. … It’s an in-group signifier—the way teens have always had in-group signifiers (when I was in high school, it was AIM, a Nokia, and wearing Abercrombie). … It’s always fascinating for me to go to other countries and see a ton of iPhone users not using iMessage but something else because that app has become the in-group signifier. … Every teen I know uses Discord more than they use almost anything else.
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It isn’t about lock-in or regulation or technology. It’s about fashion.
A study published this week says DevOps orgs and other internet companies rank third for attrition in the 38 industries surveyed. And if you lump that category together with “enterprise software,” it would be in clear first place.
But some companies get this right—how can you be one of them? Culture, innovation, recognition and remote work. It’s definitely not only about pay.
Donald Sull, Charles Sull and Ben Zweig report their fascinating study: Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation
Between April and September 2021, more than 24 million American employees left their jobs. [But] while resignation rates are high on average, they are not uniform … from less than 2% to more than 30%. … More-innovative companies … are experiencing higher attrition rates than their more staid competitors.
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Pay has only a moderate impact on employee turnover. … A toxic corporate culture is by far the strongest predictor of … attrition and is 10 times more important than compensation. … Job insecurity and reorganizations are important predictors of how employees rate a company’s overall culture. … But it is surprising that … the more positively employees talked about innovation at their company, the more likely they were to quit. … Employees are more likely to leave companies that fail to distinguish between high performers and laggards [or] that tolerate underperformance.
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Our analysis identified … actions that managers can take … to reduce attrition. … Lateral career opportunities are 12 times more predictive of employee retention than promotions [and] 2.5 times more powerful [than] compensation. … Company-organized social events, including happy hours, team-building excursions [and] potluck dinners … are a key element of a healthy corporate culture. … Unsurprisingly, when employees discussed remote work options in more positive terms, they were less likely to quit.
And the flipside of resignation? Hiring replacements. Let’s turn to the equilibrium of Nash Reilly:
It’s only gotten harder in recent months [and] I think I know why. … You need to offer engineers some combination of these three things to pique their interest: Cool stuff to work on, smart people to work with [and] some degree of repeatability.
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You can’t really prove to an engineer that you can give them things like good management, minimal churn, and decision making authority [so] let them talk to your employees. … Also, figure out a way to let your team “backchannel” to the candidate. [If] your product is not that cool … play up the things you can offer them: smart coworkers, and a stable working environment. … You can afford to be honest about what it is that you do offer to a candidate, [so] pitch them the truth: that you want to do good work, sustainably, for as long as you can—ideally with them on your team.
Perhaps the smart money is already skating to where the puck will be? Here’s echelon:
Engineering salaries are … one of the biggest expenses. … Companies love that they can now hire remotely and pay adjusted cost of living. They’ll hire as many workers in middle America as they can, and once enough of the workforce is concentrated outside of expensive cities, you’ll see them stop hiring in SF and NY entirely. [And] startup capital is already beginning to shift to … emerging markets. Employment will eventually head there too.
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Make your money now while the iron is still hot.
After accusing Mozilla of jumping the shark last week, perhaps I owe the Firefox folks a positive inclusion this time? The release notes for Firefox 96 certainly sound good.
Outside the Apple walled garden, Firefox is about the only non-Chromium browser. A browser monoculture can’t be a good thing for anyone—not DevOps nor users.
Michael Gariffo: Firefox 96 update focuses on noise improvements, main thread efficiency
On the desktop side of things, Mozilla’s latest release made “significant improvements” to the browser’s built-in [sound] noise suppression and auto-gain-control features. These improvements are aimed at web-based video chat users.
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The second tentpole feature in version 96 focuses on reducing main-thread load, which should help the browser function better on older, slower, or congested systems. [And] a new enforcement setting for cookies … will, by default, apply the “Same-Site=lax” policy. Mozilla claims this will help better defend users against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks.
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Mozilla also acknowledged that it is working on correcting the performance of detached videos being played in full screen on macOS devices. … No timeframe was mentioned for when it might be available again.
Okay. Sounds good. But not to Tetch:
Never mind all that fancy stuff. … Any reduction in crashes?
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FF crashes for me several times a month. … I always take the trouble to fill in the “What were you doing immediately before the crash?” section of the crash submission dialog, and never hear another thing.
But more efficiency on the main thread? Tell me more. ksec:
Such an important detail that deserves at least few more sentences of marketing message or explanation. But the whole release note just feels like they couldn’t be bothered anymore.
You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.
Image: Moritz Knöringer (via Unsplash)
Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: Ruby on Rails 7.0 is go, working from home is still de rigueur, and HIBP gets far, far bigger.
First up this week: Ruby on Rails version 7.0 is now in production. It promises less bloat, better security and even more developer efficiency.
Talk to devs about Ruby on Rails and you’ll hear a wide range of opinion—all the way from “obsolete memory hog” to “productivity secret weapon.” But its important promise seems to be to encourage devs to use better design patterns.
Paul Krill: Ruby on Rails 7 rejiggers JavaScript support
Ruby on Rails 7, the latest version of the web application framework, is now available as a production release. … It gives developers a “no-Node” approach to front-end development while still providing access to NPM packages and modern JavaScript.
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Most Rails applications will not require Node.js, given the new defaults. … Other improvements:
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Encrypted attributes have been added to Active Record, enabling applications to offer at-work encryption in addition to traditional at-rest and in-transit. … With asynchronous query loading, two unrelated queries can be run concurrently. … The Spring application preloader is no longer on by default, as faster computers have made it unnecessary.
Let’s hear from Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson—AKA DHH:
Seven is … the culmination of years of progress on five different fronts at once. … The part that really excites me … is how much closer it brings us to the ideal of The One Person Framework. A toolkit so powerful that it allows a single individual to create modern applications upon which [to] build a competitive business.
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It’s been well over twenty years for me now, and a big release like this still makes me giddy. … What a glorious time to be working in web development.
What a whatnow? Here’s bb_matt:
I don’t pretend … it’s a “glorious time to be working in web development,” except for one important aspect: … Experienced programmers coming over from software development and starting to make amends [with] strong typing, robust CI/CD, a focus on TDD, a focus on domain modeling.
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99% is still total **** though—but then again, so is most software.
A month ago, my long-suffering editor permitted me to write, “WTH? We Wanna WFH.” And survey after survey says tech workers work better at home. After the last 21 months, there’s simply no denying it.
If you’re under the misapprehension that DevOps is somehow “special” and your workers will be glad to return—think again. Find a way to make it work, or work will stop—and your business will die.
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: How to lure employees back to the office? You can’t. Not now. Not ever.
Months have gone by, and the great resignation keeps rolling along. … People don’t want to catch COVID-19 [but] bosses still think they can force skilled workers to return to offices. … That’s not going to happen.
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The problem? Many executives and owners haven’t gotten the clue yet. [But] any doubts you may have about people not doing a good job unless you’re looking over their shoulders should have vanished by now. … The monthly academic WFH research.com survey has found almost six out of 10 workers reported being more productive working from home. … In the Dice State of Remote Work report … 53% of technologists listed greater productivity as one of the main benefits.
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It’s simple: It works better for them and for your company. … Anyone who’s been paying attention … must agree. You can either go along with the flow, or you can fight it and first lose your staffers and then your company
So what do DevOps managers think? One of them is kozikow:
100% remote is not great either. … When there was a long period of 100% remote during Covid, there were some issues. … We developed a policy that Mondays are required, Wednesday are encouraged, rest is work from home. … It was shared decision of the team.
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I think that most people who are strongly against hybrid work just have to live in a miserable place like SF. … It’s unfortunate that so many software companies are in the Bay Area.
But you couldn’t pay some people enough to go back—people such as this Anonymous Coward:
No way in hell they’d ever be willing to pay me … to come back into an office. … No having to go out in ****ed up weather, no fighting traffic and … dangerous drivers, plus I get all that commuting time back.
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And I don’t have to put up with Linda cooking fish in the microwave.
This week saw a huge bump in the size of Troy Hunt’s already-massive database of stolen credentials. In case you’ve not seen it, HaveIBeenPwned.com is an amazing free service that lets apps securely check a user’s password isn’t already used elsewhere on a compromised site.
The UK’s equivalent to the FBI has donated a huge trove of credentials—after deduping, it’s added more than 225 million new passwords to the database. Frankly, if you still allow your users to rely on any of the 847 million passwords in HIBP, it would be negligent.
Simon Sharwood: National Crime Agency finds 225 million previously unexposed passwords
Troy Hunt, of Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) fame, yesterday announced … the NCA shared 585,570,857 [creds] with HIBP, and Hunt said 225,665,425 … he hasn’t seen before in the 613 million credentials HIBP already stored. [HIBP] lets anyone conduct a secure search of stolen passwords to check if their credentials have been exposed.
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The NCA’s statement to Hunt did not reveal the source of the password trove [but said they] “were able to identify a huge amount of … passwords in a compromised cloud storage facility. … It became clear that these credentials were an accumulation of breached datasets known and unknown.”
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[The] release brings the total Pwned Passwords count to 847,223,402, a 38 percent increase.
How’s this relevant to DevOps? Troy Hunt explains:
In the last month, there were 1,260,000,000 occasions where a service somewhere checked a password against … HIBP’s Pwned Password API. … There are all sorts of amazing Pwned Passwords use cases out there. For example … checking their customers’ passwords on every registration, login or password change to see if it’s previously been breached.
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The UK’s National Crime Agency has done some wonderful work over the years to combat cybercrime. … Today’s release is about turning on the firehose of new passwords and making them immediately available to everyone for free. Having this open to the community, owned by the community and supported by the FBI and NCA is an enormously pleasing result.
Time for a metaphorical thought experiment. LenKagetsu obliges:
You were told by a reliable source that an unknown person … posted a high-res image of … your house key … on the internet. Would you change the locks?
You have been reading The Long View by Richi Jennings. You can contact him at @RiCHi or tlv@richi.uk.
Image: David Emrich (via Unsplash)