Hedge 315: Engineering Psychology


 
We often talk about “human infrastructure” in network engineering–but what does this mean, and how do we help engineers “produce” while helping them to flourish as individuals? Catherine Hicks joins Tom and Russ to discuss the psychology of software engineering, and how the lessons learned apply to network engineering.
 
https://media.blubrry.com/hedge/media.blubrry.com/hedge/content.blubrry.com/hedge/hedge-315.mp3
 
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You can find Catherine’s new book on the psychology of software engineering here.
If you would like to follow Catherine’s writing in this area, including the impact of AI on work, you can find her blog here.
You can connect with Catherine on LinkedIn.

Worth Reading 080126


 


The honest target is goodput, meaning requests per second that actually met your latency targets. Count anything else and you are counting cold plates.

 


I find it strange that as a software industry, we put in so much effort to make our systems efficient to design, build, and scale with DevOps practices, cloud native architectures, event-driven functions, optimized databases and storage, and resource-sipping Lean IT — then we threw it all out the window when Big AI came along.

 


If there is one universal law in internet infrastructure, it is that no good intention goes unpunished by the practical realities of legacy software maintenance.

 


This Article updates and expands on 2012 research on encryption and globalization, analyzing what the authors call “Round 3” of the Going Dark Debate: the current controversies over end-to-end encryption (E2EE).

 


Using our unique position on the Internet, we took an investigative look at one of the well-known mandatory attributes in BGP, the ORIGIN attribute.

Hedge 314: Questions from a New Engineer


 
Sometimes we can be so focused on the problems in front of us that we forget the people who are following in our footsteps. Michael McCollum, a new network engineer, joins Tom and Russ to ask questions about life as a network engineer.