Mike Loukides

Ethics and Data Science has two important virtues of being free and short, which make it a decent starting place for a conversation about ethics and data science. However, it doesn't do much to advance the conversation beyond hoary tropes to "do better" with caring for user data.

The basic premise is that programming ethics is more than a code or an oath, it's a daily practice that can made explicit by checklists to question the assumptions going into your program, and "five Cs" to follow, in show more treating customer data as your own personal data.

Getting ethics right is important. Facebook's Cambridge Analytica related scandals are only the tip of the data iceberg. But I'm not sure that 20th century ideals of informed consent have much to say about the sheer combinatorial velocity of data in the 21st century. show less

A gentle introduction to a politically fraught subject. At the very least, if it stops people getting hired as DevOps engineers, or DevOps departments getting created it will have done its job.

My Unix is a little lopsided: I don't know much about security or administration, but I can edit the hell out of plain text files. I'm a programmer, not an admin, so that's what I spend my time doing. I learned Unix from this book, writing shell scripts and one-liners to automate my work. I recommend this book to anyone who intends to Actually Do Stuff on the Unix command line.

Not really useful as a reference, but good to flip through when you're bored. Nice odds and ends. You'll pick up a few things.