BASH/command-line scripting is a powerful tool. However, many of its behavior is somewhat counter-intuitive and I’d argue adversarial. I will showcase some these unexpected results by incrementally hardening a simple script. Failure is an Option #!/bin/bash echo "Launching rocket!" ROCKET_TO_LAUNCH=$(get-available-rocket) echo "I'm still running even though a command failed!" echo "Launching rocket $ROCKET_TO_LAUNCH"

“The Art of War” is a book that stood the test of time. And for an excellent reason: what better strategy there is than where it’s a matter of life and death. We are always looking for the latest research or discovered strategy that serves us best. But as different people are and as millennia pass, many factors stay the same and may even intensify, making older known strategies more effective. Another book that talks strategy much less dramatically with more of an emphasis on economics than war is “The Art of Strategy.”

“High Growth Handbook” is a book where you learn more about how companies work in various stages and even what (in a sense) money is. You will understand what makes many products you use and what goes behind the scenes and how big of a role time and other factors affect an organization. One other book that is an instrumental tool for both your personal and work life in high-growth environments and otherwise is “The Art of War.”

Credits Clean Architecture book for demonstrating this technique.

“The Phoenix Project” is a funny and edifying story centered around the IT operations and encouraging the DevOps practices. The book still has some deep insights that are hard to find even in more serious books and applicable to many fields and disciplines. It is a book where you will be a different person after reading than before. “The Site Reliability Workbook” is one other book that covers more topics in IT operations and in a more technical tone.

“The CERT C Coding Standard, 2nd Edition” covers many details of the C programming language and how to fix or mitigate their unfortunate side-effects with a focus on C11. It can be instrumental for any serious C project and would be a good baseline in greenfield scenarios where other criteria and measures are enforced for better results. What makes this book more useful is that it has both compliant and non-compliant examples for almost all of its rules.

The Safari web-browser seems to have some UI vulnerabilities that may have long been fixed in most other browsers. We can see how an HTTP Basic Authentication credentials can be easily spoofed by an attacker. The standard of reusing passwords only aggravates the impact of this defect. …

“Building Evolutionary Architectures: Support Constant Change” is one book that looks into software architecture from another perspective. In a sense, it’s the world beyond the CI/CD/DevOps/GitOps, where some conventional techniques and characteristics are abstracted away and broken down in a generic form. What makes this book special is that it has its unique content and ideas that you can’t find anywhere. It also goes through and covers existing architecture designs and explains their trade-offs.

“Mastering Algorithms with C” is an excellent choice for learning many algorithms for C programmers. It covers many basic and slightly advanced algorithms along with their full generic C implementations. …