You don’t have to read it, but you just might learn something.
Leading Thought
Prime
Poverty, Politics and Profit
Ran across a reference to this episode of Frontline from 2017 while reading a Twitter thread related to the Culture of Men, and what a truly eye-opening watch this is.
My entire life I feel like I’ve heard about Section 8 and low-income housing, and never with a positive spin. These programs, while problematic in some regards (e.g., not enough oversight) are critical to the well being of millions of people, yet suffer from the negative stereotypes of the people that need the services the most. With not only a housing shortage - for many reasons, including Real Estate Investment Trusts and AirBnB buying up properties to rent out, or people owning multiple homes reducing the overall supply – but an increase in rents, many people are priced out of basic necessities like housing.
While programs like Section 8 are meant to help cover the cost, the story mentions that only about 25% of the people who need help actually get Section 8 vouchers and, even then, there is a limited time to find housing before they expire. Given the Not-in-My-Backyard mentality of more affluent areas to accept more low-income housing projects, it becomes hard for developers to build unless the projects are in already stressed areas where little-to-no access to transit and jobs can become a barrier. Given the hurdles, finding housing that will accept Section 8 becomes difficult at best and vouchers often expire before use, leaving people no better off. Interestingly, I ran across an interview with Sen. Brian Schatz about his efforts to fix the zoning laws, rooted in Jim Crow-era rules, to help alleviate the problem.
You owe it to yourself to give this a watch. I won’t pretend that this story is an uplifting one, but it is important if only to put faces to the people caught in the cycle of poverty and, maybe, take a little bite out of the myth that anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Who knows, maybe you’ll even become a YIMBY.
For me, the seminal moment when I became an aggressively yes-in-my-backyard person was when I fully understood that zoning—exclusionary zoning in particular, restrictive covenants—came right after Jim Crow was outlawed by the Supreme Court of the United States. Folks that wanted to continue the legacy of Jim Crow figured out a way to do that which would pass constitutional muster. And so all of that stuff was designed to keep primarily Black people out of affluent neighborhoods. Even though there are a lot of progressives and environmentalists who invoke the phrase “Protect the character of our neighborhood,” we need to note that history there is pretty dark.
~ Senator Brian Schatz
The women who left their jobs to code
There is so much in this article that is an indictment of the tech industry and our society as a whole. While this is a BBC article much, if not all, of it rings true for the US as well. It is tragic, to say the least, that one of the women in the story is quoted as saying about jobs in tech, “I assumed it was a geeky, guys job - I certainly didn’t know any other women in these roles that I could look at as a role model or inspiration.” The techbro culture that has pervaded tech for years has made it inhospitable to women, this is something we can and need to fix; thankfully, there are organizations like Code First Girls, among others like those listed here trying to change this.
But wait, there’s more! One might assume that the women leaving their jobs for tech might be in a job with limited opportunity. And that assumption would be wrong. The two women in the article are a teacher and a healthcare assistant (who was looking to become a doctor). These jobs paid so little, were so thankless, despite being so critical to a strong and healthy society, that they chose to look for other opportunities rather that stay where they were. THIS is the true tragedy: we think so little of the people teaching our children or caring for others that it is better to leave than stay in a job like this. While tech absolutely needs more and stronger representation from women and other minority groups, if we gain them by making critical professions so inhospitable that people will no longer do them, we have all failed.
These are candidates who may have never considered a STEM career before, convinced it was a career just for men, or that they didn’t have the right skills. But they come with a wealth of experience to change things in technology for the better.
TBM 212: A Problem vs. The Problem
Interesting post here about the problem with defining problems. While short, the post looks at who is involved in defining the problem, as well as the tensions at play.
As the business, how many times have you come to engineers with your solution rather than your problem? That is, to use a classic example, you ask for a better drill when what you really want is to put holes in things? As an engineer, how often do you simply accept that the work you are given is correct rather than being a part of defining the problem and finding the right solution?
The reality is that the everyone in an organization should be looking to help define the problem so that everyone is on the same page when looking for a solution. It’s easy to say I need a new database to track X, Y, and Z but until you understand that the collaboration on the data is really between two people, you may not realize that the best solution may be Excel (from an effort, cost, and multiple other perspectives).
Companies move massive sums of money, energy, time, sweat, and tears based on their shared understanding of “problems,” yet the language around “problems” is often flawed.
Coming Soon
Tech Skills Day 2023
(Thursday, April 20 | Virtual)
The annual free event from Pluralsight is coming next week and it has a lineup that looks fantastic! With speakers like Scott Hanselman (Our path to success was failure), Angie Jones (The reality of developing an artificial world), and Pariss Chandler (Overcoming barriers in tech) it’s definitely worth signing up for to watch the recordings if you can’t make it live!
Juneteenth Conference
(June 15th and 16th | Chicago, IL and Virtual)
The conference to o celebrate Black Excellence in technology, promote Black technology professionals, and to encourage future Black technologists to explore careers in the field is back! For $300 (in-person) or $100 (virtual), this is steal. Definitely give it a look.
Humble Bundles
Web Development Book Bundle
New offering from Humble Bundle benefitting Cool Effect – and, if you don’t know it’s there, there is an Adjust Donation button that will let you give more of the take to charity! For a minimum donation of $18 you get 16 titles, including:
- Design and Build Great Web APIs
- Modern Asynchronous JavaScript
- Web Development with Clojure
- Programming Phoenix 1.4
- Test-Driven React
- Build Reactive Websites with RxJS
- And more!
AI
Samsung workers made a major error by using ChatGPT
This is definitely an oof revelation coming out of Samsung’s semiconductor group. Engineers were given the go-ahead to use ChatGPT for solving problems. Unfortunately, the parameters of what could go into ChatGPT may not have been clear and source code, meeting notes, among other data were put in and are now forever a part of ChatGPT’s data, with no definite recourse to have the data removed.
This is a short read that I got from Gregg Smith but definitely worth a few minutes if you are in a business considering use of ChatGPT. If you are in an extremely competitive business, then this is even more-so worth your time.
Since ChatGPT retains user input data to further train itself, these trade secrets from Samsung are now effectively in the hands of OpenAI, the company behind the AI service.
Italy temporarily bans ChatGPT over privacy concerns
This is a bit behind to talk about, but interesting nevertheless. Italy has asked that ChatGPT be blocked for quite a few reasons, not the least of which is the amount of data that ChatGPT collects – including personal information – and the amount of incorrect data it reports. A recent thread on Twitter from a conference presenter talked about how ChatGPT was used to craft the speaker’s bio except that instead of reporting the actual information, the system decided to craft a bio that the algorithm seemed to think fit better than reality.
With people like Elon Musk calling for a six-month pause on development of more powerful systems, it will be interesting to see how this goes and who follows suit. Given that the EU is already looking at laws that allow companies to be sued for damage done by AI systems, this could be a harbinger of things to come.
DE&I
Life Expectancy and Inequality
“Money means more time alive.”
Sit with that for a minute. I think that everyone realizes this intuitively and, if pressed, can probably come up with some way that proves this true. Whether it’s food deserts, inadequate access to healthcare, drugs, or many other factors, money – or the lack of it – plays a role in an average difference of 20 years of life between the richest and poorest Americans. And in the richest country in the world, we have the highest healthcare costs per capita. This is shameful.
As a country, we can justify spending for just about anything when we want to, except that we are bought into the belief that somehow privilege played no role for those who manage to be successful. That if you are caught in the cycle of poverty, you don’t deserve a hand up, that you have obviously done something wrong or been irresponsible (never mind that The Fed is willing to sacrifice some percentage of the workforce to unemployment as a lever for inflation control). And so we let people suffer. We let people die earlier simply because they are poor.
Money. Means. More. Time. Alive.
Sit with that a minute. Then read this article and be angry that we allow this to be so, even though it doesn’t have to be. And if you still think that it’s OK for a handful of people to enjoy most of the wealth, because the numbers are almost impossible to comprehend, check out this graphical representation of wealth shown to scale.
While being born in one part of the country may contribute to the age that you die, race is still an unfortunately powerful determinant too.
Engineering
Safety Nets and Guardrails: How to Turn Your Next Defect into a Win
No matter how much testing we do – automated or otherwise – bugs find their way into our code. The reasons are many: we missed a test case, we got parameters that look similar reversed without good checks in place, etc. Is it possible to eliminate all bugs before they hit production? Probably not. What we can do is learn from the errors made to help prevent future repetition.
While the author doesn’t call them out specifically, the natural extension of “the two critical questions” we should ask about each bug in our code from Steve Maguire’s book Writing Solid Code is Blameless Incident Reports/Reviews/Postmortems or BIRs. BIRs are a great tool for uncovering the root cause of defects and finding action items that will hopefully prevent them from occurring again. The two main bug-prevention techniques talked about here are Detection and Prevention, as well as some key strategies for each.
Even if you think you have a good handle on detection and prevention, or may do dome of the suggestions by muscle memory, it never hurts to review. Definitely worth a read if you do software engineering.
Infosec
Awesome Malware Techniques
A curated list of resources to analyse and study malware techniques.
If you’re looking to get into malware fighting, this may be a good place to start.