These hints are not novel, not foolproof recipes, not laws of design, not precisely formulated, and not always appropriate. They are just hints. They are context dependent, and some of them may be controversial.
Bible Study: Romans 3
- Romans overview (video): Part 1, Part 2
- What is Romans?
- Romans contains letters from Paul to the churches of Rome.
- The church of Rome had existed for a long time and was made up of Jews and Gentiles. Emperor Claudius had banished the Jews from the church for 5 years. When the Jews returned there was a split between Gentiles and Jews in how they should follow Jesus and practice their faiths. Paul’s letters were an attempt to explain his faith and unite the Jews and the Gentiles into one faith worshiping Jesus. Paul hoped the Roman churches could become a staging ground to enable Paul to expand the church into Spain and beyond.
- Romans is structured as follows:
- Books 1-4: Revealing God’s Righteousness
- Books 5-8: Creating a New Humanity
- Books 9-11: Fulfilling God’s Promise to Israel
- Books 12-16: Unifying the Church
Romans 3
What are the advantages of being a Jew?
- God gave supernatural instructions to the Jews – they received these instructions before anyone else so that all the nations could be blessed.
- See Acts 7:38, 1 Peter 4:11 – the Word is passed from them to the world.
- The ancestors of the Jews includes the Messiah, Jesus Christ.
Israel’s unbelief or unfaithfulness doesn’t cancel God’s promises in the Old Testament.
- God keeps His promises.
God did not agree to fulfill His promises to all Jews – God said He will fulfill all His promises even if individual Jews cannot receive these promises due to lack of faith (Psalm 51:4).
- God is bigger than any man’s sin or unfaithfulness.
- We can always repent to receive His promises.
We can’t continue to live in sin, even if we delude ourselves into thinking it brings attention to God.
- The Jews were convinced that their animal sacrifices would make up for their ongoing sins.
- This is a similar argument that many atheists make: “I can sin my way through life and just accept Jesus as my savior on my deathbed”.
The Jews were asking: “if my lie amplifies God’s truth why should I be punished?”
- Because you committed a sin by lying – the condemnation is deserved.
- It’s not true that “the more you sin the more you can be forgiven”.
- It is not possible to avoid judgement if you commit sin. The Jews were attempting to justify their sins as a way to glorify God.
- There is no one who does good – this includes both Jew and Gentile. This means God is going to judge everyone.
- This is why we ALL need Jesus Christ as our Advocate.
- For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. (Romans 3:23).
- God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for our sins, enabling us to become righteous.
There is only one God who makes everyone right by faith – both Jew and Gentile.
What’s New in the Reliable Web App Pattern for .NET
The pattern champions resiliency patterns such as retry, and circuit breaker, performance efficiency patterns like the cache-aside pattern and optimizes for cost and security. It also shows you how to achieve a 99.9% business service level objective (SLO) with multi-region support.
The Serverless Illusion
Serverless reduces the need for (readily available) ops skills but increases the demand for (less readily available) distributed system design skills.
Considerations for AI Opt-Out
The Web already has a way for sites to opt-out of automated crawling: the robots.txt file. This makes perfect sense – which is why it will likely never happen.
Source: Considerations for AI Opt-Out
Why Do Bitcoin ATMs Exist?
Source: DSHR’s Blog: The Roach Motel Of Banking
What kind of customer needs to pay 22% plus $3 for “access to … financial services” which won’t let you cash out?
I’ve seen a Bitcoin ATM here in British Columbia and I’ve always wondered who uses it and why it’s even there. Now I think I know, and it’s a pretty dark reason.
The Last Straw
I love the privacy of the Brave browser but a couple of things made me decide to switch back to Firefox:
- More and more sites seem to be dropping support for Brave. That seems very odd because Brave is based on chromium and Google Chrome is one of the most popular browsers out there. This means that site developers are proactively detecting Brave and blocking its use. The reason is probably because Brave is one of the most effective browsers for blocking user tracking.
- Brave is based on Chromium which Google controls. Google is using its Chromium code to treat users like children, monopolize browser behavior, and break the web.
- Chromium’s approach to treating you like a child was the final straw for me. Turning off “safe browsing” prevents you from downloading anything. Ridiculous.
I still plan to use Brave Search since it’s the most private search engine and doesn’t censor its results.
DevOps, Platform Engineering, and Site Reliability Engineering
DevOps unites development and operations. DevOps is the practice of breaking up monolithic architecture and teams to create smaller, autonomous teams that can build, deliver, and run applications.
Platform Engineering (PE) focuses on abstracting out infrastructure or other things that distract DevOps teams from delivering their domain. PE is a fairly new buzzword/concept and is really just a subset of DevOps.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) focuses on helping DevOps and internal platform teams increase reliability, scalability and security.
DevOps vs SRE vs PE
- DevOps focuses on the development side.
- SRE focuses on the operations side.
- PE focuses on internal development enablement and is really a part of DevOps.
SRE and Platform Engineering benefit from the three ways of DevOps:
- Concentration on increasing flow
- Tight feedback loops
- Continuous experimentation, learning and improvement
Role comparisons:
- Infrastructure Engineer – Generic term for engineers who works on core infrastructure.
- Cloud Engineer – Engineers who works on public cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP, etc).
- SRE – Software engineers who focuses on application reliability, budgeting uptime, and toil automation. Three letter terms are their friends (SLO, SLA, SLI).
- DevOps Engineer – Infrastructure engineers who focuses on reducing silo between development teams and infrastructure teams. NOTE: If your team has dedicated DevOps Engineers, your org isn’t really practicing DevOps.
- Platform Engineer – Engineer who focuses on designing and building tools and workflows that enable self-service. An enabler of software engineering teams.
Recommended Reading: Decentralized Systems Aren’t
Source: DSHR’s Blog
Fascinating post explaining how decentralized systems frequently aren’t. The post raises several thought-provoking questions:
- What is a viable business model for participation that has decreasing returns to scale?
- How can Sybil attacks be prevented other than by imposing massive costs?
- How can collusion between supposedly independent nodes be prevented?
- What software development and deployment model prevents a monoculture emerging?
- Does federation provide the upsides of decentralization without the downsides?
I love that last question – it remains to be proven.
Bible Study: Romans 2
- Romans overview (video): Part 1, Part 2
- What is Romans?
- Romans contains letters from Paul to the churches of Rome.
- The church of Rome had existed for a long time and was made up of Jews and Gentiles. Emperor Claudius had banished the Jews from the church for 5 years. When the Jews returned there was a split between Gentiles and Jews in how they should follow Jesus and practice their faiths. Paul’s letters were an attempt to explain his faith and unite the Jews and the Gentiles into one faith worshiping Jesus. Paul hoped the Roman churches could become a staging ground to enable Paul to expand the church into Spain and beyond.
- Romans is structured as follows:
- Books 1-4: Revealing God’s Righteousness
- Books 5-8: Creating a New Humanity
- Books 9-11: Fulfilling God’s Promise to Israel
- Books 12-16: Unifying the Church
ROMANS 2
- Romans 2 Reading Guide
- Romans 2 Teaching Notes (PDF)
- Romans 2 Video
- At a Glance: Romans 2 sets the stage for the rest of the letter by establishing that everyone is a sinner and needs God’s grace for salvation. It critiques both those who rely solely on external rituals and those who trust in their own righteousness. Romans 2 is foundational toPaul’s doctrine of Justification by Faith which must have been a difficult concept for first century Jewish believers to grasp. Most of their lives have been characterized by rote obedience and adherence to the Law until Paul told them that it isn’t about what you do, but why that makes it important…. and more difficult.
- Key verses:
- Romans 2:6: “He will render to everyone according to their deeds:” (NIV)
- This verse emphasizes God’s justice and the principle that everyone will be judged based on their actions. It sets the stage for the universality of sin and the need for God’s grace.
- Romans 2:29: “But a Jew is one who is inwardly, and circumcision is of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the letter; his praise is not from man but from God.” (NIV)
- This verse challenges external markers of faith and emphasizes a genuine heart transformation as the true mark of being a follower of God. It’s a core concept in Pauline Christianity.
- Romans 2:6: “He will render to everyone according to their deeds:” (NIV)
- Key verses:
- Important points:
- Universal Condemnation (vs. 1-16)
- Paul confronts both Jews and Gentiles by saying everyone sins and deserves God’s judgment.
- He argues that even those who follow a moral code will be judged based on their actions, not just their knowledge of the law.
- Conscience as Internal Witness (vs. 14-15):
- Paul introduces the concept of conscience as an internal witness that accuses or excuses people based on their actions.
- This conscience can be seen as a reflection of God’s moral law written on the human heart.
- Jews Not Automatically Justified (vs. 17-29):
- Paul challenges the idea that simply being Jewish guarantees salvation.
- He argues that true righteousness comes from following God’s will, not just possessing religious knowledge or heritage.
- Circumcision (vs. 25-29)
- Paul redefines circumcision as a matter of the heart, meaning obedience to God’s law, not just a physical act.
- This challenges the Jewish emphasis on physical circumcision as a sign of God’s covenant.
- Universal Condemnation (vs. 1-16)
- Chapter 2 Summary:
- Do not judge others since you do the same things. God’s kindness intends to turn you from your sins.
- Everyone will be judged according to what they have done – those that live for themselves will be punished (Jews first, then Gentiles).
- Those Gentiles who sin but do not have God’s written law will still be punished. (2:12)
- Gentiles instinctive obey God’s law even though they have never heard it (2:14)
- Merely listening to the law is not enough – you must obey it as well. (2:13)
- Jesus will judge everyone’s secret life (2:16)
- Jews boast about a special relationship with God (2:17) yet continue to sin (2:21-2:27)
- Jews who don’t obey God’s law are not God’s chosen people. Gentiles who obey God’s law can be God’s chosen people. (2:25-2:26, 2:28-2:30). Note: This contradicts the belief of most Jews – this might be why Jews don’t read or study the New Testament.
