[master] 0d5da11fb Do you feel lucky Punk ?

Thu Jan 3 00:46:06 UTC 2019

commit 0d5da11fbea10ab04fa241502056f71b01330d3e
Author: Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at FreeBSD.org>
Date:   Thu Jan 3 00:44:48 2019 +0000

    Do you feel lucky Punk ?

diff --git a/doc/sphinx/phk/index.rst b/doc/sphinx/phk/index.rst
index 7962d9ea5..d258654d8 100644
--- a/doc/sphinx/phk/index.rst
+++ b/doc/sphinx/phk/index.rst
@@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ You may or may not want to know what Poul-Henning thinks.
 .. toctree::
 	:maxdepth: 1
 
+	lucky.rst
 	apispaces.rst
 	VSV00001.rst
 	somethinghappened.rst
diff --git a/doc/sphinx/phk/lucky.rst b/doc/sphinx/phk/lucky.rst
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@@ -0,0 +1,179 @@
+.. _phk_lucky:
+
+===================
+Do you feel lucky ?
+===================
+
+Whenever a corporate cotton-mouth says anything, their laywers
+always make them add a footnote to the effect that *"Past performance
+is not predictive of future results."* so they do not get sued for
+being insufficiently clairvoyant.
+
+The lawyers are wrong.
+
+Past performance *is* predictive of future results:  That is how
+we determine the odds.
+
+Just never forget that the roll of the dice is still pure luck.
+
+Or as author Neil Gaiman said it in
+`a commencement speech in 2012 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OwRUyZMKwI>`_:
+
+ *»Often you will discover that the harder you work,
+ and the more wisely you work, the luckier you get.
+ But there is luck, and it helps.«*
+
+Approximately four million real websites use Varnish now and the
+number seems to grow by half a million sites per year, as it has
+been doing for the last 8 years.
+
+That took a lot of luck, and wisdom was probably also involved, but
+mostly it was lot of hard work by a lot of people.
+
+Wisdom is a tricky thing, the hypothesized "older—wiser" correlation
+is still in clinical testing and in the meantime Neil Gaiman suggests:
+
+ *»So be wise, because the world needs more wisdom, and if you
+ cannot be wise, pretend to be someone who is wise, and then just
+ behave like they would.«*
+
+Works for me.
+
+----
+2018
+----
+
+Despite sucking in pretty much any other aspect, 2018 was a good
+year for Open Source Software in general and Varnish Cache in
+particular.
+
+People have finally started to understand that Free does not mean
+Gratis, and that quality software takes time and effort.
+
+From to the dot-com generation reinventing reproducible builds (like
+we had then in the 1980'ies) to the EU setting up a pot
+of `850M€ bug-bounties
+<https://juliareda.eu/2018/12/eu-fossa-bug-bounties/>`_ [#f1]_,
+things are moving in the right direction with respect to software
+quality.
+
+In 2018 the Varnish Cache project had settled into our "March and
+September 15th" release strategy, and released 6.0 in March and 6.1
+in September, as promised, and the next release will be out in ten
+weeks.
+
+We also had no security issues, and we have managed to keep the
+number of open issues and bug reports down.
+
+Writing it like that makes it sound boring, but with four million
+web sites depending on Varnish, boring is good thing.
+
+No news is indeed good news.
+
+---------------
+2019 and HTTP/3
+---------------
+
+The Next Big Thing in our world seems like it will be HTTP/3 ("The
+protocol formerly known as QUIC"), and I suspect it will drive
+much of our work in 2019.
+
+It is far too early to say anything about if, when or how, but I
+do spend a lot of time with pencil and paper, pretending to be
+somebody who is good at designing secure and efficient software.
+
+Around the time of the 2019-03-15 release we will gather for a VDD
+(Varnish Developer Day), and the big topic there will be HTTP/3,
+and then we will know and be ready to say something more detailed.
+
+I don't think it is realistic to roll out any kind of H3 support
+in the september release, that release will probably only contain
+a some of the necessary prepatory reorganization, so expect to
+run production on 6.1 for a while.
+
+---------------------
+Varnish Moral License
+---------------------
+
+I want to thank the companies who have paid for a `Varnish
+Moral License <http://phk.freebsd.dk/VML/index.html>`_: 
+
+* Fastly
+
+* Uplex
+
+* Varnish Software
+
+* Section.io
+
+* Globo
+
+The VML funding is why Varnish Cache is not on EU's hit-list and
+why another half million websites who started using Varnish in
+2018 will not regret it.
+
+Much appreciated!
+
+-------
+ENOLUCK
+-------
+
+For me 2018 ended on a sour note, when my dear friend `Jacob Sparre
+Andersen <http://www.jacob-sparre.dk/>`_ died from cancer a week
+before christmas.
+
+Society as such knows how to deal with deaths, and all sorts of
+procedures and rules kick in, to tie the loose ends up, respectfully
+and properly.
+
+The Internet is not there yet, people on the Internet have only
+just started dying, and there are not yet any automatic routines
+or generally perceived procedures for informing the people and
+communities who should know, or for tying up the loose ends, accounts,
+repositories and memberships on the Internet.
+
+But deaths happen, and I can tell you from personal experience that
+few things feel more awful, than having sent an email to somebody,
+to receive the reply from their heartbroken spouse, that you are
+many months too late [#f2]_.
+
+Jacob was not a major persona on the Internet, but between doing a
+lot of interesting stuff as a multi-disicpline phd. in physics,
+being a really good Ada programmer, a huge Lego enthusiast, an
+incredibly helpful person *and* really *good* at helping, he had a
+lot of friends in many corners of the Internet.
+
+Jacob knew what was coming, and being his usual helpful self, he
+used the last few weeks to make a list of who to tell online, where
+things were stored, what the passwords were, and he even appointed
+a close friend to be his "digital executor", who will help his widow
+sort all these things out in the coming months.
+
+When people die in our age-bracket, they usually do not get a few
+weeks notice.  If Jacob had been hit by a bus, his widow would have
+have been stuck in an almost impossible digital situation, starting
+with the need to guess, well, pretty much everything, including
+the passwords.
+
+In honour of my helpful friend Jacob, and for the sake of your loved
+ones, please sit down tonight, and write your own list of digital
+who, what and where, including how to gain access to the necessary
+passwords, and file it away in a way where it will be found, if
+you run out of luck.
+
+Good luck!
+
+*phk*
+
+.. rubric:: Footnotes
+
+.. [#f1] I am not a big fan of bug-bounties, but I will grudingly admit
+   that wiser men than me, notably `Dan Geer
+   <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT-TGvYOBpI>`_, have proposed that
+   tax-money be used to snatch the vulnerabilities up, before bad guys
+   get hold of them, and they seem to have a point.
+
+.. [#f2] And it does not feel any less awful if the loved ones
+   left behind tries to fill the blanks by asking you how you knew
+   each other and if you have any memories you could share with them.
+ 
