Stuff They Don't Want You To Know - Presidents and Substance Abuse

It's no secret that being President is a stressful job (to say the least). A sizable amount of the domestic population will hate you regardless of what you do in office, and various groups around the world will actively hope you die. So how do these incredibly stressed individuals blow off steam? In today's episode, Ben, Matt and Noel explore the strange story of Presidents and substance abuse.

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The Stack Overflow Podcast - A collaborative hub for infrastructure as code

On this sponsored episode of the podcast, we talk with Marcin Wyszynski, founder and CEO at Spacelift. Marcin says Spacelift aims to be for infrastructure-as-code what GitHub is to git. It centralizes everything about your IaC system: it runs code, deploys within CI/CD pipelines, tracks the progress of your infrastructure, and gives you insight into who made what changes and why. Today it works with the IaC tools already out there: Terraform, Cloud Formation, and Pulumi, with plans to add support for services like Ansible and Kubernetes in the future. 

Like a lot of programmers, Marcin got into coding through games. Once he ran through the limited number of Commodore 64 games at his local shop in Poland, he learned to program his own. But he never thought of programming as a career, so when it came time to pick a college major, he followed a group of his peers into sociology. Sociology, with its heavy focus on statistics, brought him back to programming. 

He landed his first job at Google reviewing copy for Ads, which lasted until he could automate himself out of it. Google gave him increasingly technical roles until he moved into an SRE position handling tape backups, a job that is mostly very boring until it becomes extremely exciting. After that, it was a stint at Facebook spinning up point-of-presence clusters around the world, then CTO at a startup that didn’t catch on as he’d hoped. 

With this wealth of experience under his belt, he went into consulting. As a consultant, he had his bag of best practices, open-source tools, processes, and scripts that he brought with him, but he also built bespoke pieces of technology for every single one of his clients. One need his clients had in common was a way to manage the code that defined their infrastructure. 

During Marcin’s career, there were many times when he built the thing he needed: games, automation, scripts. When his consulting clients would leave for a new organization, they would reach out to ask if he could provide them with the solution he had built for infrastructure as code. Realizing that he had created something which addressed a pain point common to many companies, he decided to turn this solution into a new company: Spacelift. 

Spacelift aims to take the heavy lifting out of infrastructure-as-code, automate it, and make it auditable. When a change gets made, everyone can see it and comment on it. From the product manager to the junior dev, everyone knows what’s going on, even if an infrastructure change doesn’t fit the original architecture docs. Plus, the SRE team no longer need to go on archeological expeditions to find a database secretly running and costing the company five figures a month. 

To learn more about Spacelift, check out their website at https://spacelift.io/, where you can start a free trial and see it in action. 

Short Wave - Should Big Oil Pick Up The Climate Change Bill?

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals is deciding whether a Baltimore case against more than a dozen oil and gas companies will be heard in state or federal court. The city argues the companies are liable for the local costs of climate change. It wants the case heard in state court, which is governed by robust consumer protection laws. But industry lawyers are fighting hard to have it and more than 20 other similar lawsuits nationwide tried in federal court, where the oil and gas industry may be more likely to prevail.

NPR climate correspondent Rebecca Hersher, brings an update on the case, which went before the U.S. Supreme court last year. She explains how this pending decision may prove key to determining who pays for climate change.

Listen to the full Short Wave episode from last year about this case here: n.pr/3gcJDOk

Email the show at shortwave@npr.org.

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Big Technology Podcast - Digital Publishing’s Next Evolution — With Brian Morrissey

Brian Morrissey writes The Rebooting on Substack and hosts The Rebooting Show, a podcast. He is the former editor-in-chief of Digiday and digital editor of Adweek. He joins Big Technology Podcast to discuss how digital publishing is evolving from an industry reliant on social media for distribution to one that prioritizes focus and dedicated audiences. Stay tuned for the third segment where we discuss Brian's views on Web3, crypto, and how these new technologies may help the industry.


Headlines From The Times - Mexico’s murdered journalists

Mexico trails just Syria and Iraq as the deadliest country in the world to be a journalist. That’s according to data collected from 2000 through 2022 by the Committee to Protect Journalists. And the Mexican government has done little to stop it.

But in the wake of the murder of four reporters so far this year — José Luis Gamboa, Margarito Martínez Esquivel, Lourdes Maldonado López and Roberto Toledo — Mexican journalists are openly criticizing President Andrés Manuel Lopez Obrador and government officials like never before.

More reading:

Journalists throughout Mexico say enough to killings and crimes against press

Photojournalist shot to death outside his home in Tijuana

She told Mexico’s president she feared for her life. Then she was killed
 


 

The Daily Detail - The Daily Detail for 2.2.22

Alabama

  • Secretary of state Merill responds to claims about ERIC systems used in AL elections
  • Response to Parent's Choice Act from head of  AL Christian Education Association
  • Jury now deliberates over Roy Moore -Leigh Corfman double defamation lawsuit
  • Singer songwriter Lee Greenwood was in Madison County to "Help a Hero"

National

  • Johns Hopkins releases massive study of on Lockdowns for Covid 19
  • Biden administration creates a sanctions list of Russian oligarchs connected to Putin
  • NY Times sues US State department for emails connected to Hunter Biden
  • Canadian Convoy and vaccine protest  expands to Border town between Canada and US

The Intelligence from The Economist - Action pact: NATO’s Ukraine role

Our correspondent speaks with Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary-general, who says the alliance’s involvement in de-escalating Russia tensions is a sign of its resurgent relevance. After tortuous votes, Italy’s lawmakers elected a president: the incumbent who did not want the job. No posts have changed, but the political balance surely has. And we meet the nuns racking up followers on TikTok. For full access to print, digital and audio editions of The Economist, subscribe here www.economist.com/intelligenceoffer