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9/11/01… 21 years later, it’s still not easy. I still get goosebumps at the thought of it. The sight of the date at the US Open women’s final was a jarring reminder I wasn’t going to get through this weekend without the utmost mental focus. Today is hard for a lot of people for a lot of reasons. I’m not going to let it ruin my day. This is the first 9/11 that all the perpetrators have been either captured or killed. We’ve reached this critical point in history where I feel things easing, just a little, around this day. My heart goes out to the families of those lost on 9/11 and the US-led wars afterward. Today especially, be kind. O’Reilly Book on Observability Engineering—Get Yours Free from Honeycomb! Manage complex cloud-native systems, improve customer experiences, and build & run better software using Honeycomb. Get your FREE copy of our new O’Reilly book and register for our Authors’ Cut Series to discuss key concepts. ...

It’s a holiday weekend here in the US. We spent Saturday afternoon soaking in some of the best Detroit has to offer: Eastern Market, the Detroit Jazz festival, river walk, Renaissance Center, Hart Plaza, Woodward Ave, and Campus Martius. It was cool that most of downtown was blocked off so we could walk more freely than usual. Downtown was alive thanks to the Jazz festival. I can’t wait for folks to see this magnificent city during KubeCon. O’Reilly Book on Observability Engineering—Get Yours Free from Honeycomb! Manage complex cloud-native systems, improve customer experiences, and build & run better software using Honeycomb. Get your FREE copy of our new O’Reilly book and register for our Authors’ Cut Series to discuss key concepts. Jobs Now Hiring: Developer Advocacy Manager Camunda is the leader in process orchestration software. Our software helps orchestrate complex business processes that span people, systems, and devices. With Camunda, business users collaborate with developers to model and automate end-to-end processes using BPMN-powered flowcharts that run with the speed, scale, and resiliency required to compete in today’s digital-first world. ...

Another week, another senseless loss. This week marked the third suicide to take place in my family/extended family in my lifetime. To a degree, I understand if you’re suffering. But, suicide is a long term solution to generally short term problems. If you or someone you know is considering harming yourself, please reach out. The psychological damage you will inflict on others is far worse than going to a therapist yourself. At the very least, please reach out to one of the numbers listed on the American Psychological Association Crisis hotlines and resources page. I’m literally in therapy going through a suicide that was very close to me that I never got to put the loose ends around, from 15 years ago. Don’t do this to people you care about, it’s not fair. O’Reilly Book on Observability Engineering—Get Yours Free from Honeycomb! Manage complex cloud-native systems, improve customer experiences, and build & run better software using Honeycomb. Get your FREE copy of our new O’Reilly book and register for our Authors’ Cut Series to discuss key concepts. ...

Dear reader, please share this newsletter with a friend. Continued growth is a neccessary thing in the newsletter writing business. I am looking for ways to incentivize this without costing and arm and a leg. I read two articles this week that together make for an interesting economic problem. Pharmacists and others are stuck in the middle of wage stagnation and face overwhelmingly increasing demand for vaccinations, medicine shortages, and frustrated customers. A swath of people in the US (pharmacists in particular) has seen decreasing wages while others have seen wage growth. I’ve seen this first hand. In the US, most of our medical interactions are with pharmacists. Not nearly as much as in Europe, but if you have a medical condition, you see your pharmacist more often than doctors if everything is “manageable.” My CVS, where everyone used to know me by name, has had so much turnover lately that I could see the stress on the pharmacy’s staff faces that I didn’t recognize. “Hey Chris, I’ll be right with you.” a pharmacy tech that knows me said after helping someone in the store and approaching me from behind. There were two other people in line ahead of me, and the transaction times were gruelingly long. The amount of information communicated during the transactions was dense. This was mainly due to varying insurance policy coverage from plan to plan. The pharmacy had to explain to the customer before me that their old insurance has different coverages than their new insurance. That’s something that is a citizen’s responsibility here in the US. ...

I spent the week in Seattle. I’m writing this in SeaTac waiting for my flight back to Detroit because we’re going to a friend’s birthday party tomorrow night. Work is good, but I had a meeting this week to start working on a blog post for a new project I’m contributing to; GitBOM. GitBOM hopes to more clearly and cleanly identify dependencies in code bases without human intervention. GitBOM aims to complement SBOMs, not replace them. GitBOM creates “consistently construct verifiable Artifact Dependency Graph (ADG)s across languages, environments, and packaging formats, with zero developer effort, involvement, or awareness to enable automatic, verifiable artifact resolution across today’s diverse software supply chains.” Why is this important? Why am I getting involved? Because the government standard is far too low to be useful and SBOMs are starting to look like the cookie consent boxes that GDPR brought us. One thing I’m exceptional at is going from an order from the US government to the actual documentation implementing how the order should be followed. As I sat there listening to Aeva Black talk about how compute intensive (and expensive) it is to generate an SBOM of any significant depth. I wanted to know how the Cyber Security Executive Order had been implemented. ...