Posts by Richard Darst
Hopes for new IT compliance
- 11 May 2026
I recently saw that due to “organizational change”, our small-scale development IT compliance process is changing. As usual for these matters at my organization, security by obscurity is the rule (even when it’s not security related), so I won’t go into the details. But I do have thoughts, and writing lets me give suggestions.
The platform compliance pitfall
- 09 May 2026
Roads don’t have to accept responsibility of who drives on them. There are some standards for being safe, though. Imagine how much all construction would get slowed down if it gets bogged down in administartive work looking in detail about who goes over the road?
Book review: First, break all the rules
- 26 April 2026
I recently read the book First, break all the rules, based on seeing it referred to in another source. It is one of these things about management, and I hoped to learn something that would help me in my job. It seemed to be a bit more practical and useful than some management books, and it was roughly true.
Notes on Debian with a read-only root
- 12 April 2026
I run several Raspberry Pis for home servers. They currently use SD cards for their root filesystems (the actual data is stored either on USB disks on NVMe disks), and I wanted a way to preserve the life of the SD cards. Can I make them more like an appliance, that just works and only rarely gets updates, rather than a normal server that’s always writing to disk.
Manifesto on university IT departments
- 10 March 2026
Alternative title: Challenging patterns with university IT for research
Book review: Systemantics
- 15 December 2025
I read the book Systemantics by John Gall. I saw some reference to it from another book, and Systemantics was short, so I figured why not. In the end, I’m glad I did - while it’s not scientific book, it’s given me a way to put various problems into words, which will probably be useful.
RSE lessons from Civil Engineering
- 31 July 2025
I have had a long-running metaphor of {academic researchers, research software engineers} being like {architects, structural engineers}. The basic idea is that coming up with interesting and worthwhile ideas/designs is a distinct field from giving ideas “structural integrity” (=reproduciblity and technical rigor).
