March is Women’s History Month and this past Wednesday was International Women’s Day. I have a lot of people that influence me. I observe and take notes from a wide group of people who have great experiences to learn. This week I would like to take a moment and recognize some of the fantastic people that have influenced and helped me over the course of my DevOps journey. This list is 100% personal and selfish. You should make and share your own (even if it’s just one).

Jessie Frazelle: Jess has been a wealth of knowledge both technically and socially. If I ever have a question about containers or Go I can go read something Jess has written or in a pinch ask her flat out. Jess is one of the smartest people I know. What’s even crazier is despite how in demand she is, Jess is one of the nicest people I know. I nominated Jess for The 2017 Women In Open Source Award because she will likely go down in history as one of the greatest contributors of our generation. Thank you, Jess, for everything.

Ashley McNamara: Ashley has helped me learn a bunch of coding fundamentals along my DevOps journey. She has referred me to so many people to talk to about myriad problems I have had over time (I have lost count). Ashley is a constant sounding board for issues, CFPs, and career advice. I cannot thank her enough for her guidance and advice. Ashley is an all around great person and friend too. She does all this while being a fantastic source of parenting advice. Thank you, Smash.

D Ruth Holloway: I met Ruthie at Open Source 101. Ruthie is a badass Perl coder which means I immediately respected her. Ruthie was gracious enough to sit down with me and discuss trans women issues. I consider myself objectively oblivious on this topic. I also live in a state that has been hostile towards trans women. Ruthie sat down with me and laid out what life was like for her. She explained concepts and things I had never realized could be an issue for someone. This will make me a better person in the long run and for that I am thankful.

Rikki Endsley and **Jen Wike Huger: Rikki and Jen both have helped me become a better writer. I work with them on ideas and stories for opensource.com. Jen comes up with creative and inspiring content ideas. Rikki has seriously taught me a lot about editing. Thank you, both, Rikki and Jen.

Charity Majors: Charity was instrumental in prepping me for my DevOpsDays Detroit talk. Charity has helped me frame my thoughts in such a constructive way I am surprised she isn’t a psychologist. Charity is one of the most insightful people in tech today. She has seen it all, is incredibly approachable, and will help you through the toughest of problems. Thank you, Charity, sooooooo much.

Bridget Kromhout: I met Bridget at DevOpsDays Detroit. This was my first talk at a tech conference in front of such a large audience. My topic was not straight up technical and I was very nervous. I wanted maximum impact and I asked Bridget how she thought I could best discuss diversity issues in our industry. She told me my story was very compelling but, I had to make it more personal. I did make it personal and I think it hit home for the male dominated audience. I also channeled Bridget’s quiet confidence to fight off my nervous. Bridget is always a wealth of information on Arrested DevOps too. Thank you for your help, Bridget.

Julia Evans: True story: I wanted to be an architect when I grew up. My entire early childhood I tinkered with floor plans, building designs, and art. When I was 11 or 12 my biological mother took me to meet some architects at their office. They all said, “Don’t do it, kid. You’ll never make any money.” Dreams dashed! Art dead! Julia, through her zines and educational columns made art okay again for me. I bought an Apple Pencil and [I started drawing again](https://chrisshort.net/drawings/. Thank you, Julia, you brought art back into my life. Julia has also made it really easy for me to explain complex systems to others (so thankful).

Jill Jubinski: Jill and I might get into the occasional Twitter fight when talking about certain issues but, I have the utmost respect for her. Jill works the human side of DevOps (recruiting, HR, etc.). She has been a huge help in making sure I am in the right place career wise. Since a falling out with my father (the former HR Director), Jill has been one of the few HR people I trust anymore. Thank you, Jill, it means a lot.

Alice Goldfuss: Alice might be one of the funniest people in DevOps today. Her Twitter timeline is a veritable bounty of quips and tech advice. Her on-call anecdotes make me think about how my own on-call rotation could be better. Her contributions to books I’ve read recently and monitoring big Java apps (which I have to do regularly) are appreciated beyond what I could ever type here. Thank you, Alice.

Department of Sane Workplaces

Jesse Genet has some sage advice for people in her fantastic piece: Five things you should never, ever say to a woman in tech. A MUST READ.

carly has red hair tells us what it’s like to work at Slack and it sounds like a dream job.

Just read through this Twitter moment and think about your co-workers. Gender bias is affecting their performance and they will still persevere.

A very close friend told me shortly after getting out of the Air Force not to work for banks (a big sector here in NC). This article on why you shouldn’t work at banks is a sound reminder.

Department of Choice Concepts

I started tinkering with Atomic Hosts this week. I had some questions and was not finding good answers. I remembered I have a friend that is THE EXPERT on Atomic Hosts, Chris Collins. Within minutes, Chris had my Atomic Host problems solved and he shared it with all of us!

ctop is a tool for monitoring containers and is very cool.

Swift has an ambitious plan for becoming a systems language and IBM is helping Apple achieve that goal.

Department of Data Defense

I discovered a very useful tool for security minded people in DevOps (or DevOpsSec) this week. **Anchore.io **does security scanning of Docker containers. If you need to figure out what a container actually does, point Anchore at your container registry and let it rip! Anchore is a great tool that can integrate with Jenkins to adding some security muscle to your pipeline.

There is an SELinux coloring book.

Department of Happy Little Clouds

There are some very common system calls that run horribly on AWS. gettimeofday and clock_gettime run ~77% slower on AWS.

Google’s Committed Use Discounts program appears to be at least 35% cheaper than AWS Reserved Instances (RIs).

Department of Interior

What if I told you that, like in Star Wars, DevOps has a dark side? I have seen the light side everyone thinks of and have carried the red lightsaber as well. Let’s walk into the cave on Dagobah together.

Not DevOps But Still Cool

Who remembers Windows 95’s disk defragmentation tool? I sure do! I ran it every Friday night for YEARS. Relive the good ole days complete with sound.

DevOps’ish Tweet of the Week