@jon_moore asked his Twitter followers what would Software Engineering as a University Major look like and he posted the interesting replies to to a storify post worth checking out. I found an interesting article, at Dr. Dobbs by Chuck Connell, on contrasts between Software Engineering and Computer Science that I largely agree with.

John Allspaw wrote a fascinating roundup of his thoughts on the 6th Resilience Engineering Symposium.

This, in particular, caught my eye:

There is no Resilience Engineering (or Cognitive Systems Engineering or Systems Safety for that matter) without real dialogue about real practice in the world. In other words, there is no such thing as purely academic here.

(via @jon_moore)

35 minutes that are absolutely worth it. Watch Jacob Kaplan-Moss at PyCon 2015 explain why he is a ‘mediocre programmer’ and why we need to take a hard look at our industry, how we define our careers, and the myths we tell, because they are flawed, and we are all the lesser as long as it remains so:

It is human nature to look for patterns and to assign them meaning when we find them. Kahneman and Tversky analyzed many of the shortcuts we employ in assessing patterns in data and in making judgments in the face of uncertainty. They dubbed those shortcuts heuristics. In general, heuristics are useful, but just as our manner of processing optical information sometimes leads to optical illusions, so heuristics sometimes lead to systematic error. Kahneman and Tversky called such errors biases. We all use heuristics, and we all suffer from biases. But although optical illusions seldom have much relevance in our everyday world, cognitive biases play an important role in human decision making. And so in the late twentieth century a movement sprang up to study how randomness is perceived by the human mind. Researchers concluded that “people have a very poor conception of randomness; they do not recognize it when they see it and they cannot produce it when they try,” and what’s worse, we routinely misjudge the role of chance in our lives and make decisions that are demonstrably misaligned with our own best interests.
— Thomas A. Limoncelli, Strata R. Chalup, Christina J. Hogan, “The Practice of Cloud System Administration”

Normally I wouldn’t pass along a list like this, but Lifehacker’s done a decent job listing 10 paths to teach yourself how to code.

Read Simon Brown’s post about how microservices are not the Silver Bullet some are promoting them to be.  As always, pick the right tool for the problem *and* for who will be solving it (the team and organization matters!!!). Sometimes, yes, that’s microservices. Sometimes it’s not. Pick your poison, but do so with open eyes and a level of clarity.