Stuff I'm reading, St Patrick's Day edition

While the corned beef is boiling, take a break, pour yourself a cold green-colored beverage and read.

• Agile Is Dead (Long Live Agility)

  Those four lines and one practice encompass everything there is to know about effective software development. Of course, this involves a fair amount of thinking, and the basic loop is nested fractally inside itself many times as you focus on everything from variable naming to long-term delivery, but anyone who comes up with something bigger or more complex is just trying to sell you something.

• Smart Guy Productivity Pitfalls

  If my pithy advice were little more than "Be more like John Carmack" then I can imagine a lot of readers throwing up their hands and saying "Well, fuck it, I'm a lost cause, because that's not going to happen." But what I can do is relate some of the things that helped me kill off some of my underachieving habits. The point isn't to become a superstar, it's to become better, since that's always the first step.

• The One Problem

  if you speak more than 30% in a conversation, you are boring the other person. If you forget everything I said and just remember to STFU and listen, you have a fair shot at building a product that market wants.

• Good Riddance to Hampton, Florida?

  The town's three staff members resigned in February, and so has the police chief, who at one point was employing 17 officers ("a word loosely applied here," said the Times) for a town of 477 people. The county sheriff said he did not know how many of the 17 were actually police officers or whether any of them were actually trained in radar detection.

• How Sony Makes Music For Your Favorite Games

  Yesterday, I was able to take a tour of Sony's state-of-the-art PlayStation Music Studio at the company's headquarters in San Mateo, Calif., where I met the guys responsible for the music in some of the best games released in the last few years.

• NTP and the Winter of 2013 Network DRDoS Attacks

  The only information that should come in to your network from the outside should be from messages that never have your address as the “sender” — the only place such messages should come from are from within your network. An “ingress” filter at your border would block these forgeries.

• A Plea for Architectural & Specification Stability with IPv6

  excuses for not deploying IPv6 are, to a great extent, just that: excuses. They have no relationship to the actual reason for not deploying it, which is, and has always been, "we see no benefit" (or, to a lesser extent, "our code doesn't support it", and "our code has bugs" -- both of which are temporary). These excuses mislead the IETF into thinking that the lack of IPv6 deployment means that there is somehow something wrong with the protocol. This in turn causes hand-wringing and standards-writing, but in my experience, that doesn't help: when we remove an excuse, people move on to another excuse -- because the excuse wasn't the real reason anyway.

• Using OpenSSH Certificate Authentication

  In 2014 ssh certificates are still a fairly obscure subject, neither widely understood or used. With such an obscure subject, one could almost expect it to be either hard or complex to implement – it is neither hard nor complex, just not well documented.

  The goal of this guide is to show how easy it is to use and manage ssh certificate authentication from small to very large environments in a practical way.

• The Infinite Lives of BitTorrent

  That’s why, among its many definitions and identities, BitTorrent is ultimately a very curious thing: a gigantic question about what startup success should look like. Most startups don’t achieve their world-changing ambitions, but the lucky ones happily settle for being acquired. BitTorrent seems to be stuck in the middle of all this--profitable, but unable to truly ever capitalize on the revolution it unleashed.