The personal blog of Arthur Khessin

Transform crisis into energy

Enjoyed listening to a recent podcast with Antje Heimsoeth (advisor to many DAX executives) talking about the current events. Had, could, would – this does not help us in the crisis. We can only live forward, not backward. Straighten up and move on.” What helps now is to build a realistic future scenario in your […]

Managed Kubernetes pricing benchmark

TL;DR: Google Cloud has the most attractive pricing for Managed Kubernetes (based on March 2020 price lists). Most organisations that consider modernising their infrastructure and app stack, are moving to a Kubernetes setup. There are various very competitive offers for a managed cloud service. So – which one offers best bang for your buck? Who […]

Why Not WireGuard

With increasing share of remote work, question of the right VPN protocol comes up more frequently. The “new” kind on the block is Wireguard. Benchmark values speak a clear language. Compared to OpenVPN, there is a factor 4 improvement in terms of bandwidth. Now we talk! Yes… but, says Michael Tremer from IPFire blog (a […]

Life on the moon

Intriguing to see how Soviets have imagined life in outer space. Topics popular in the 1960s and 1980s are now relevant again—ecology, alternative energy, reasonable consumption, overpopulation, and waste recycling. Back then it was regarded as futurology, but for us it’s already the reality. Source: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-space-graphics

Is everything a simulation?

Searching for a good argument that we might *not* be living in a Simulation? Neil deGrasse Tyson have finally found one. Love it!

Reliability at scale

Enjoyed reading a story from Google Site Reliability Engineering about the way they trace problems. At Google scale, million-to-one chances happen all the time All incidents should be novel.

Cloud +600%, energy +6%

Data centers are the backbone of the digital world, they are responsible for 1% of world’s electricity use. Good news though – all hyperscalers (Google, Amazon, Microsoft) have worked hard to make them as efficient as possible. As recent a research paper found out, between 2010 and 2019 the computational capacity of data centres grew […]

Forget gamification

Rahul Vohra (founder of Superhuman, my favourite email app) spoke about how he designed an enterprise application based on 7 primary game design principles to make it fun, rewarding and productive. Principles of Game Design: Create concrete, achievable, and rewarding goals Design for nuanced emotion Create rapid and robust controls Make fun toys, and combine […]

Artistic CSS

Art knows no limits… Beautiful examples of CSS perfection to draw famous images. Fun fact – it looks different depending on the browser you choose 🙂 Hint: Chrome and Safari show it best. “The Simpsons” by Chriss Pattle “Portrait” and “Fruits poster” by Diana Smith

Make yourself invisible

In case you want to share photos and videos on internet, but don’t want face recognition engines to identify you, there might be an interesting solution – a digital cloaking filter. An increasing number of researchers focus on the problem on how to reclaim digital privacy while still participating in the digital world. Algorithms such […]

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