11 December, 2020

I am interested in the latest server-less offerings for Aurora. As a developer I like to work at a relational or document database level. I have built replicated databases in the past to provide concurrency and reliability but it always seems like detail that would better be left to engineers with these interests in mind. Server-less databases provide the intersection of database, storage, networking, and security as a service.

In a related note, Elastic Block Storage is becoming more useful and inexpensive. Reliable file systems that expand on demand would have been fantasy a decade ago and now they are a commodity. My only wish now is that elastic storage and simple storage service regions be integrated.

Data Ecosystems provides a strong argument for creating universal data stores that can be accessed by service providers of your choosing. He suggests that Solid is a good starting point. I suspect he is right.

Redecentralie Digest for this month features decentralized infrastructure. A GitHub replacement looks interesting. See the Radicle site.

A frequent argument I have with my boys is: What is the purpose of their English classes? They want to pursue STEM, and think reading and writing are subjects learned in primary school. I find reading other people’s work and writing my conclusions to be the largest part of my day. As we decentralize our workplaces in space and time this will become as important as solving the the actual problem. Today I found Future of Work that expresses the thought more deeply than I had considered.

I think that humans doing human things like editing and cataloging the artifacts that distributed work requires allows more people to contribute to the shared economy. Spending less time in video meetings would allow me to spend more time on the deep dives I need to deliver the software I am trying to develop. Having specialists that can explore my solutions, question assumptions, and make me refine my presentation would streamline the process of communicating the structure of solutions.

All of the artifacts produced by a temporally distributed team will need curation to be useful. Much as an editor creates a framework to express your thoughts with economy, a library science specialist can make the work available to others with a similar set of requirements. Our search engines have become very good at reducing large corpus stores to keyword searchable archives. Context and associative knowledge have suffered. Imagination is important when creating archives for humans.