48 lines
7.2 KiB
Markdown
48 lines
7.2 KiB
Markdown
---
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layout: post
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title: Open Tabs No 3
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subtitle: This week in Open Tabs.
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category: opinion
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tags: [custdev, culture, cto]
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author: holger_reinhardt
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author_email: holger.reinhardt@haufe-lexware.com
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header-img: "images/bg-post.alt.jpg"
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---
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[Open Tabs](http://dev.haufe.com/meta/category/opinion/) is my weekly column to share links and commentary based on the list of my open (browser) tabs.
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Last week has been slow since it is prime vacation time here in Southern Germany. And that in turn is a good time to step outside the daily email, telephone and meeting vortex and do something truely revolutionary - work hands-on with some of the technologies on my personal short list.
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And hands-on work I did. I finally installed [Rancher](http://rancher.com) on my Digital Ocean cluster and put it to good use to bring my application stacks. I have to say I am very impressed - I used to be a big [Tutum](https://blog.tutum.co) fan but Docker's pricing has decisively moved it outside of my hobby range. With Rancher I have finally found an easy-to-use docker management tool, which is open source and can be installed locally. And in addition it uses native docker-compose file syntax for application deployment. What more can I wish for.
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{:.center}
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{:style="margin:auto"}
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The experience has been so smooth that I am wondering if Rancher could have a place next to our CI/CD pipeline - not for automated deployments, but for ease of experimentation with various application stacks. I now run my own instances of [RocketChat](https://gist.github.com/hlgr360/d7f6ae9452f77c193fea81fc94e5c730), [ownCloud](https://gist.github.com/hlgr360/d8832ee7d02ca6fa4ab6be4857bac26d), [Calibre](https://gist.github.com/hlgr360/39ee1f7c45ec39cf4c4832df3219fb4e), and - yes - my very own [Minecraft](https://gist.github.com/hlgr360/c8cfc249de2e6f4548e9ad231051187f).
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{:.center}
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{:style="margin:auto"}
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But rolling my own is not without risk - so hence the first entry of my Open Tabs is [Hacking Developers](http://bouk.co/blog/hacking-developers/). I am currently looking at securing my setup using SSL as described in [How To Secure HAProxy with Let's Encrypt ](https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-secure-haproxy-with-let-s-encrypt-on-ubuntu-14-04) and Rancher's own [Load Balancer Service](http://docs.rancher.com/rancher/v1.1/zh/cattle/adding-load-balancers/). [Adding certificates](http://docs.rancher.com/rancher/v1.1/zh/environments/certificates/) to Rancher seems to be rather straightforward. Last but not least I am also looking into [Securing Container Orchestration](http://blogs.adobe.com/security/2016/08/security-considerations-for-container-orchestration.html)
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Next up are [Lessons from Launching Billions of Containers](http://www.infoworld.com/article/3112875/application-development/lessons-from-launching-billions-of-docker-containers.html) from the folks at <http://iron.io>. And even though I used Rancher for launching my stacks manually, I also want to read up on [Tips for an effective Docker-based Workflow](https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/4-tips-for-an-effective-docker-based-workflow)
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In the Devops corner I stumbled over a Thoughtworks article on [When to Automate and Why](https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/when-to-automate-and-why). I really like their concept of `ruthless automation`.
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On the API and architecture side of the house I would like to read the new article from Netflix about the [Engineering Tradeoffs and the Netflix API Re-architecture](http://techblog.netflix.com/2016/08/engineering-trade-offs-and-netflix-api.html) and the corresponding blog entry from Apievangelist on [Netflix Public API Was The Most Successful API Failure Ever](http://apievangelist.com/2016/09/07/the-netflix-public-api-was-the-most-successful-api-failure-ever/).
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Even though we keep talking about our Cloud journey, a large portion of our business continues to come from Desktop products - and based on my own experiences using the Apple App Store on my Macbook, I tend to see predictions of Desktop dying anytime soon very sceptical. This is why I am so excited about cross-OS desktop platform like [Electron](http://electron.atom.io) which originated from Github's [Atom Editor](https://atom.io) project. This is definetly an area I would like to get more hands-on. Since I have fairly large number of eBooks which I manage with [Calibre](https://calibre-ebook.com), I was thinking to maybe try my hands on an [Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS)](http://opds-spec.org/about/) desktop client for digital libraries.
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Which actually gets us back into the API story, since OPDS is nothing but an [Atom](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4287.txt) protocol tailored for digital publications. You can learn the story behind OPDS by reading the wonderful article on [How the New York Public Library made ebooks open, and thus one trillion times better](https://boingboing.net/2016/08/21/how-the-new-york-public-librar.html) which points to another wonderful article on [The Enterprise Media Distribution Platform At The End Of This Book](https://www.crummy.com/writing/speaking/2015-RESTFest/), and yes - Hypermedia as an inspiration for OPDS. In that latter presentation you will find a link to [Library Simplified](http://www.librarysimplified.org), an open source eBook library system with beautiful designed mobile clients.
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For Internet of Things (IoT) I have currently two articles in my tabs: [Javascript in the Realm of IoT with NodeRed](https://blog.pusher.com/javascript-in-the-realm-of-iot-with-node-red/) and [Deploying an IoT Swarm with Docker Machine](http://blog.hypriot.com/post/deploy-swarm-on-chip-with-docker-machine/).
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You probably have read about the Apple event last week. Stratechery's latest blog post looks at [Beyond the iPhone](https://stratechery.com/2016/beyond-the-iphone/). Which brings us to business strategy in general. I am currently reading Kotter's book [Accelerate](http://www.kotterinternational.com/book/accelerate/) which has some interesting parallels to the debate on Gartner's model of [Bimodal-IT](http://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/bimodal).
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If you work a lot with eBooks like me you probably end up with a large number of "highlights"". To make those highlights usuable in my normal work flow I am currently going to my account on <http://kindle.amazon.com> and take a snapshot of the page in [Evernote](http://evernote.com). This makes it searchable. But I am also haven't given up my idea of converting them (in markdown format) to beautiful mindmaps. You can find my "weekend" project [here](https://github.com/hlgr360/mindmap.js).
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Last but not least I had a very interesting discussion over at the API Academy (my mater emeritus) slack channel how the use of incentives can scew the results, as best seen in the recent news of [Wells Fargo employees opening fake accounts](https://twitter.com/ritholtz/status/774236789624205312). An interesting pointer in that discussion was to [Goodhart's Law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law) which I had not heard before. It states that `When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.`
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This should cover it for this week. Plenty to read, think and catch up on. See you again next week.
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