The gist of this book is a guy, from the UK, moves to Japan after college to work in a school over there. With no Japanese and never being there before, it’s a trial by fire and he’s to deal with the culture clash and other random situations of a small, relatively rural corner of Japan. A while in he starts a YouTube channel and this grows over time into a great success.

The book itself is split into two parts. The first is about moving to Japan, getting over the culture shock and settling in. The second is about his success as a YouTuber and the opportunities that afforded.

I think the best/most interesting thing about this book for me is the first part. I’m not saying the second part isn’t good, but it does take a different approach to things. The first very much focuses on the small details of living in a relatively unknown corner of Japan. Even just moving to a new country is an interesting story, much more so a country like Japan where the language barrier is great and the culture is vastly different to somewhere like the UK. I find it just so interesting to learn about the mundane or trivial every day interactions. I read before, in The Discovery of France the following quote about how the more people that have an experience, the less evidence we have about it:

IT SEEMS TO BE a law of social history that the greater the number of people with a particular experience,

Optimistic locking Transactions proceed freely without acquiring locks, only at commit time are they checked for potential conflicts. This means that a HUGE number of transactions can be in flight without locking contention.

In opposed to pessimistic locking where the transaction acquires the lock before attempting the transaction.

Napoleon was a bona fide intellectual, and not just an intellectual among generals. He had read and annotated many of the most profound books of the Western canon; was a connoisseur, critic and even amateur theorist of dramatic tragedy and music; championed science and socialized with astronomers; enjoyed conducting long theological discussions with bishops and cardinals; and he went nowhere without his large, well-thumbed travelling library. He was to impress Goethe with his views on the motives of Werther’s suicide and Berlioz with his knowledge of music. Later he would inaugurate the Institut d’Égypte and staff it with the greatest French savants of the day. Napoleon was admired by many of the leading European intellectuals and creative figures of the nineteenth century, including Goethe, Byron, Beethoven (at least initially), Carlyle and Hegel; he established the University of France on the soundest footing of its history. He deserved his embroidered coat.

• Napoleon the Great (Andrew Roberts)

He seemed to read everything and anything he could get his hands on. And not only that but he would remember it too as evident by the respect of experts in the field he was reading about.

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Mastering the art of asking the right questions isn’t just about filling your head with more information; it’s about sparking curiosity, embracing the unknown, and being okay with not having all the answers.

Curiosity

Looking back, perhaps the lesson I would draw is this: If you don’t love it, don’t do it. I loved it—teaching people how to reach in deep to fulfil their potential, how to become great. And when you do that with a group, you, as the leader, enjoy the thrill of creating a great team. For me it was like creating a work of art. Only instead of painting on a canvas, I had the great joy of creating in collaboration with others.

The Score Takes Care of Itself - Bill Walsh

I’ve come across this a few times the last day or two where you should aim to do something that you really love doing. The other was a Founders podcast about Ken Griffen of Citadel who’s been doing that for 30 odd years now and also makes the claim that you need to love what you’re doing. He also brought up how we all dedicate our lives to something, so you may as well make it worthwhile. For some that could be mastering a niche skill or hobby, for others it might be their kids, and others yet again it might be work related. But regardless, at least try make it worthwhile and make it something you enjoy doing. And at least try be better than the rest.

This means that when a packet comes in, the time it takes the kernel to check it against all of the Service rules is O(n) in the number of Services. As the number of Services increases, both the average and the worst-case latency for the first packet of a new connection increases (with the difference between best-case, average, and worst-case being mostly determined by whether a given Service IP address appears earlier or later in the KUBE-SERVICES chain).

https://kubernetes.io/blog/2025/02/28/nftables-kube-proxy

NFTables are an alternative to iptables in kubernetes that should be better for high load clusters. There’s obvious difficulties with replacing such a critical piece of functionality for kubernetes so it definitely needs a lot more testing in the real world before it is put into production systems. But the benefits are there and are clear. It is far faster, especially at high scale. For packet routing iptables is O(n) whereas NFTables should be closer to constant time. As for inserting and making changes, iptables often has to make changes to everything, whereas NFTables can make much more incremental updates such as only to what has changed

With both iptables and nftables, the total size of the ruleset as a whole (actual rules, plus associated data) is O(n) in the combined number of Services and their endpoints. Originally, the iptables backend would rewrite every rule on every update, and with tens of thousands of Services, this could grow to be hundreds of thousands of iptables rules. Starting in Kubernetes 1.26, we began

“What’s the worst that can happen?” As Churchill said, failure is seldom fatal, and just realizing that even the worst-case scenario is survivable can bolster your confidence.

• The Charisma Myth

Failure being okay and nothing to be afraid of is something you read everywhere but never really internalise the message and learn from it. Too easy is it to not do something just in case things go wrong and you’ve to explain to others or figure out what has happened.

To learn something new, one way is to go and experience it. Over the next hill. This is why the young depart and travel. Or, someone might have gone there for us. What they have learned comes to us as a story, a lesson at school, a Wikipedia entry, a book. Aristotle and Theophrastus go to the island of Lesbos, they minutely observe fish, molluscs, birds, mammals and plants – they write it all down in books, and in doing so they open up the world of biology.

White Holes by Carlo Rovelli

While the book is primarily about physics, specifically white holes, there’s lots of references to literature and religion mixed in that makes it about so much more than just that. It is a really enjoyable book for that alone. The specific subject the book is about is white holes, a sort of opposite to black holes. But it is about so much more from the general scientific process to how literature reflects the natural world. For example, Dante’s Infermo is brought up over and over in likeness to someone travelling into a black hole.

With a little attention, we can also account for the fact that we are inside a black hole just by looking around. Here space is spherical, just like it is outside, around the horizon – but outside, with powerful enough rockets, we can move (upwards) towards larger spheres. Inside, on the contrary, whatever we do we will find ourselves in ever smaller spheres. The

Taking notes, in my opinion, is the best thing one can do for themselves. Writing is a form of thinking, and writing manually, in an analog manner, elevates the process. It has a positive impact on your well-being. It’s akin to working out for hours and then returning home to relax. You know your body hurts, but it feels good. Writing has that same feeling for me.

https://arslan.io/2025/02/24/plotter-notebook-system/

I wouldn’t confine this to analog only but writing does help

In our search for measures of delivery performance that meet these criteria, we settled on four: delivery lead time, deployment frequency, time to restore service, and change fail rate.

This is one of the main points of the book in terms of what you should be measuring. The key thing all this achieves is making changes faster. If changes can be made quickly then developers can ship much easier. You can deploy and roll back changes faster means they’ve less risk when they go out. This gives you speed. If you’ve to take days or weeks to think about what change you can make and how you need to make it, then it slows down everything and in fact increases the risk of the change. Instead look to reduce the risk and increase the speed. Proper monitoring for the changes should exist so they can be detected and rolled back quickly.

In continuous delivery, we invest in building a culture supported by tools and people where we can detect any issues quickly, so that they can be fixed straight away when they are cheap to detect and resolve.

A key goal of continuous delivery is changing the economics of the software delivery process so the cost of pushing out individual changes is very low.

For lots of metrics you should avoid making a particular metric the goal as you’re likely to end up with everyone optimising for that. This is probably no exception so you’ve to be careful