Welcome to All Cloud, No Cattle Weekly #2.
Tech
Cryptocurrency Start-Up Underpaid Women and Black Employees, Data Shows
Coinbase is, of course, the company that famously tried to implement a no-politics policy forbidding anyone in their employ from having opinions about things like this.
So really, I’m shocked to read this news. SHOCKED.
Well. Not that shocked.
How to Prepare for a Site Reliability Engineer Interview
SRE helps break the stereotype that developers don’t take accountability for the services they build.
My one and only quibble with this article is that, in my not so humble opinion, “Site Reliability Engineering” is a discipline and “Site Reliability Engineer” should not be a job title. You might be a Software Engineer in SRE or a Production Engineer in SRE or even a Systems Administrator in SRE but you shouldn’t be a Site Reliability Engineer.
Much that we have gotten wrong about SRE
This article is worth it for the illustrations alone.
GoDaddy Phished Their Employees with a Covid Bonus Offer
“Though we cannot celebrate together during our annual Holiday Party, we want to show our appreciation and share a $650 one-time Holiday bonus!” the email read. “To ensure that you receive your one-time bonus in time for the Holidays, please select your location and fill in the details by Friday, December 18th.”
That’s some galaxy-brain level ass haberdashery, right there.
A daily listing of remote job postings.
I wish I were even joking about that one.
After staving off elimination earlier this year, COVID-19 finally catches up to sports team scheduling service Teamstuff. While no SaaS project is inherently easy, this seems like an area that someone can step into once in-person sports are allowed again.
Grab Bag
USA Hockey Proposed Rule Changes (pdf)
Two major changes will prove quite controversial, if approved: icing would be enforced for shorthanded teams, and immediate offside for all levels of youth hockey.
Regarding icing, the rationale is that teams who commit penalties are suddenly allowed to break another rule with impunity and that’s inherently unfair. The overall message of this rule, when taken with some others, is not that USA Hockey wants to increase scoring, but rather that they want to reduce penalties. If your team will be both shorthanded and unable to ice the puck, you will play a high-skilled game with fewer penalties. The consequences of a penalty are just too high.
When it comes to offside, delayed offside is sometimes confusing for youth players and even some referees. Immediate offside was already the rule in some of the younger divisions. I imagine elite levels will continue with delayed offside as house league rules or what have you.
Don’t look for these rules changes to show up in professional leagues.
The NHL does have its own offside rule update, though. Skates no longer need to be in contact with the blue line, as long as they haven’t “broken the plane.” The original rule was written when instant replay at 10k FPS was a pipe dream and blade-on-the-ice seemed a reasonable determinate. The new rule maintains the intent of the rule, which is that players not have a positional advantage.
Monsters of 2020: The People Who Gutted Minor League Baseball
It should go without saying that one of the teams driving this movement—though by no means the only one—was the Houston Astros:
[T]he Houston Astros, a model of modern player development, bucked that trend a few years ago. After the 2017 season, they reduced their affiliate count from nine to seven clubs. The Astros believed they could become a more efficient producer of talent with fewer farm clubs.
Of course they did. At the time, the Astros were being feted as baseball’s new meritocrats.
As a life-long fan of both the Astros and Minor League Baseball, their complicity in this wounds my soul. This is the kind of stuff I point to when people ask me why I despise them now; they’ve damaged the game in ways that go far beyond their trashcan-banging cheating scheme.
Sex-hungry foxes migrate through the center of Amsterdam (Dutch)
At least the Red Light District is getting some visitors, even if it’s wildlife.
“Hallelujah” Is Not A Christmas Song
They’re not wrong.
@metaplexmovies thread about the Republic-era Jedi
At the end of the Republic, the Jedi were the bad guys. Don’t @ me.
But the rule book says that even though the water was in New Mexico’s reservoir, it was Texas’s water that evaporated. (Section C5, “Texas Water Stored in New Mexico Reservoirs”.)
I love that there’s someone whose official title is “River Master of the Pecos River” and that there’s a Pecos River Master Manual (pdf).
Christian communities are coronavirus hotbeds, official figures show
Nine of the 10 biggest coronavirus hotbeds in the Netherlands are classified as Christian council areas, according to research by Trouw, and based on figures from public health institute RIVM.
RIP Austin: All the Places Permanently Closed Due to COVID-19
This list wounds me deeply. Personal favorites on the list include Magnolia Cafe, Threadgills, Luby’s, Dart Bowl, Easy Tiger, and Cap City Comedy.