Four short links: 1 February 2017
Unhappy Developers, Incident Report, Compliance as Code, AI Ethics
- Unhappy Developers — paper authors surveyed 181 developers and built a framework of consequences: Internal Consequences, such as low cognitive performance, mental unease or disorder, low motivation; External Consequences, which might be Process-related (low productivity, delayed code, variation from the process) or Artefact-related (low-quality code, rage rm-ing the codebase). Hoping to set the ground for future research into how developer happiness affects software production.
- GitLab Database Incident Report — YP thinks that perhaps pg_basebackup is being super pedantic about there being an empty data directory, decides to remove the directory. After a second or two he notices he ran it on db1.cluster.gitlab.com, instead of db2.cluster.gitlab.com. YP died for your sins.
- Compliance as Code — instead of relying on checklists and procedures and meetings, the policies and rules are enforced (and tracked) through automated controls, which are wired into configuration management tools and the Continuous Delivery pipeline. Every change ties back to version control and a ticketing system like Jira for traceability and auditability: all changes must be made under a ticket, and the ticket is automatically updated along the pipeline, from the initial request for work all the way to deployment.
- Ethical Considerations in AI Courses — In this article, we provide practical case studies and links to resources for use by AI educators. We also provide concrete suggestions on how to integrate AI ethics into a general artificial intelligence course and how to teach a stand-alone artificial intelligence ethics course.
