Topi Kettunen

What I Read in March 2023

Pretty technical month in my reading this time.

Liz Rice: Container Security

I got free copies of this book and the couple of next books from an event so I decided to read them through due to how close they are to my profession. While working as a plumber, container security tends to be a very common topic and also topic that I’m very interested in. Rice is pretty popular public figure in the “cloud native” world who I’ve seen to give great talks about wonderful topics in the past, which made me quite excited about this book.

Generally speaking book itself was good. It offered a nice and relatively brief overview of various techniques that are involved in container security and also giving a nice understanding of containers itself. Personally, I probably would’ve wanted it to be slightly more practical, but nonetheless, I think it’s a great tech book addition to many bookshelves.

Liz Rice: Learning eBPF

Another book from Rice. I’ve been big fan of eBPF for many years so I was quite excited about this one also. Timing of receiving this book was great since I was just about to give a talk on how me and my colleagues at my current employer have used eBPF based technologies in our day-to-day work at Isovalent’s (creators of eBPF) Cilium (Kubernetes CNI) Workshop that we were hosting in Berlin.

I have been already working quite a bit Linux Kernel and eBPF before so there wasn’t necessarily that much new stuff from the book but there were some and lots of refreshers so I really enjoyed it.

eBPF is also a topic quite dear to me, so I already have some posts about in the woodshed. So expect more in that front from me.

John Rosso et al: Production Kubernetes

This was the last book that I got for free and was quite interested about it too. Despite working with production Kubernetes for quite a few years already, I wanted to read this to see if I could learn some new stuff from it. Overall, I think it’s a great book if you happen to work with Kubernetes. For me, most of the stuff was something that I knew already from using Kubernetes for many year, but still I think it offers a great “introduction” to how to operate Kubernetes in production.

John Maeda: The Laws of Simplicity

I’ve had this book on my library for many years but I just haven’t been able to start reading. Especially in tech, simplicity is something that tends to by highly valued, and for a reason. While this book applied mainly to design of various products etc., Maeda himself comes from technical background, so lots of the stuff he writes, can be applied to computer science and programming. I think it was a great book!

E.M. Foster: The Machine Stops (reread)

I have read this sci-fi short-story for many times already and I love it every time. It’s a very psychedelic book to read in 2020s. Book itself was written in 1909, but somehow even back then Foster was able to depict a future where humans are addicted to technology. Very short book but great! I think I originally found it from some Jaron Lanier’s talk about social media so this book made my almost luddite stance towards tech even stronger.