This is not how I wanted things to end.
I’ve been dealing with an elbow injury for a while. I finally went to the doctor’s to figure out what was going on. That became the least of my worries shortly thereafter. I’ve been diagnosed with yet another ailment.
This time it’s my heart 🫀. I’m under explicit doctor’s orders to cut stressors out and do things that bring me more joy. Basically, I need to stop doing so much.
Writing a newsletter is like working under a constant deadline. DevOps’ish is many hours of extra work every week. I walk on a razor’s edge to continue managing it as an independent brand while working a full-time day job at a major cloud provider. DevOps’ish turned into a second job and income stream years ago. At the very least, I’ve proven I can do it (which means I could always do it again).
Every Q4 (October), I ponder long and hard about continuing DevOps’ish. It was a topic of discussion at KubeCon with my close friends. Before I got the doctor’s order, I had decided to put DevOps’ish into hiatus mode at the end of the year. It has been an excellent six-year run. I’ve learned a lot, and I hope you have too. But, in light of this recent news, I have to idle the newsletter immediately.
DevOps’ish has accomplished its primary goals. It was important to me in 2016 to make a name for myself in this industry, have a tool to help further my career, and as a bonus, become a respected DevOps publication.
All good things must come to an end. It’s hard to let go of something you’ve built. As I said, I wanted it to go differently. A few folks have offered to help over the years, but I liked the tone of DevOps’ish to stay the same. My morals and values drive the newsletter. That’s almost impossible to replicate.
What happens now?
The list of emails will be cared for like state secrets (stored behind many keys and locks). If DevOps’ish gets sold, you will be asked to opt in again. This newsletter is more concerned about your privacy than open and click rates. In the interim, devopsish.com will remain up. The GitHub repo isn’t going anywhere, either. The subreddit will remain available for now as well.
I’m holding out a modicum of hope that I can optimize the time-consuming parts of making the newsletter. If I reach a point health-wise where I can return to DevOps’ish, I will. It might return only as a podcast (which is shutting down, too, for now) or live stream. Right now, that’s not a pressing matter.
Most importantly, thank you.
Thank you for your close to six years of readership. I appreciate the supportive messages over the years. I owe you if you’re a friend who helped me along the way. Thank you to the haters, too (you were gasoline on my fire). Thank you to the many sponsors over the years (especially Honeycomb) My views of what’s essential in DevOps and any organization trying to move faster still apply today: People, Processes, and Tools, in that order. Strong opinions, loosely held. Assume positive intent (unless indicated otherwise).
I’m not going anywhere. I will still be on social media (with fewer Suggested Reads; I still need to figure out what I’m doing with that system). I’ll still be writing at chrisshort.net (RSS). I will enable RSS for DevOps’ish in case there is news in the future. I’ll also be figuring out how to manage better the stress I put on myself to do things (this will be a hot topic at therapy next week).
What should you you read instead? I’ve maintained kubenews.net and devopsnewsletters.com for years now. 😉
So long for now. I wish you all the best of luck.
Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Mastodon.
The DevOps’ish Podcast
The DevOps’ish Podcast is on hiatus due to the health concerns explained in the introduction. But, it could return if I can stabilize my health (iCal and Google Calendar).
O’Reilly Book on Observability Engineering—Get Yours Free from Honeycomb!
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People
Elon Musk begins mass layoffs of Twitter staff
Faiz Siddiqui, The Washington Post
Friday was a really sad day on the Twitters. “Employees said the layoffs came across teams, as Twitter broadly reduced its workforce. Musk originally pitched investors on cutting Twitter’s staff up to 75 percent.”
Layoffs at Lyft: 700 workers to be cut
Catherine Thorbecke, CNN Business via WRAL TechWire
“In a memo to staffers on Thursday, a copy of which was shared with CNN Business, Lyft (LYFT) co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer said the layoffs will impact every part of the company, and pointed to broader macroeconomic challenges that led to the cuts.”
A message from our CEO and Co-Founder, Eric Wu
Opendoor
Opendoor is laying off “~550 people across all functions – approximately 18% of the company.”
Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants us to ‘ignore’ Web3
Ryan Browne, CNBC
“Tim Berners-Lee, the computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web, said he doesn’t view blockchain as a viable solution for building the next iteration of the internet.” Ya don’t say?
White House invites dozens of nations for ransomware summit
AP News
“The second International Counter Ransomware Summit will focus on priorities such as ensuring systems are more resilient to better withstand attacks and disrupt bad actors planning such assaults.”
Forget Free Coffee. What Matters Is if Workers Feel Returning Is Worth It.
Hanna Ingber, The New York Times
For folks like me, the office is a hinderance. My home office is purpose built for me and my varying needs. You’re not going to give me a corner office, with furniture, and all the bonuses of being able to source your own supplies (coffee, soda, LaCroix, lunch, etc.). “Commutes are still painful, readers say. And it’s hard to give up the joys of working from home. But many of those who have gone back to the office say they like it.”
Process
Information for decision-makers considering the SAFe framework
The SAFe Delusion
“Curated review of facts, evidence, and opinions from relevant sources without vested interests, to help decision-makers make informed choices and get better results”
CVE-2022-3786 and CVE-2022-3602: X.509 Email Address Buffer Overflows
OpenSSL Blog
Thankfully, this wasn’t the internet stopper we were fearing. I highly encourage you to subscribe to the openssl-announce mailing list if you were at all worried about this.
The Most Vulnerable Place on the Internet
Matt Burgess, WIRED
“The cable, also known as AAE-1, was severed where it briefly passes across land through Egypt. One other cable was also damaged in the incident, with the cause of the damage unknown. However, the impact was immediate.”
Operating Mastodon, Privacy, and Content
Kris Nóva
“With the recent announcement of Elon Musk purchasing Twitter, myself (a long time Twitter user) and many of my professional peers and colleagues are finally tip-toeing away from the social media site…” As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I’m on hachyderm.io (the Mastodon instance maintained by the author).
GitHub Copilot litigation
Joseph Saveri Law Firm & Matthew Butterick
Well this will be sure to 🌶️🌶️🌶️spice🌶️🌶️🌶️ up the GitHub Copilot debates.
Supply Chain Attack Pushes Out Malware to More than 250 Media Websites
Elizabeth Montalbano, Dark Reading
“TA569 has modified the JavaScript of a legitimate content and advertising engine used by news affiliates, in order to spread the FakeUpdates initial access framework.” Malvertising was a problem back in 2011 when I worked at a newspaper company and it still is today.
SQLite patches 22-year-old code execution, denial of service vulnerability
Charlie Osborne, The Daily Swig
“Dormant 32 bit-era coding flaw causes problems for 64-bit systems”
Tools
A Visual Guide to SSH Tunnels (with labs)
Ivan Velichko
This was the most viewed thing on my social media this week and there’s a printable version.
Live and let live with Kluctl and Server Side Apply
Alexander Block, Kubernetes Blog
“One of the main philosophies that Kluctl follows is “live and let live”, meaning that it will try its best to work in conjunction with any other tool or controller running outside or inside your clusters. Kluctl will not overwrite any fields that it lost ownership of, unless you explicitly tell it to do so.”
VS Code Can Do That?
Burke Holland and Sarah Drasner
All the best things about Visual Studio Code that nobody ever bothered to tell you
For the love of god, stop using CPU limits on Kubernetes (updated)
Natan Yellin, Robusta
“Many people think you need CPU limits on Kubernetes but this isn’t true. In most cases, Kubernetes CPU limits do more harm than help.”
Multi-cluster management for Kubernetes with Cluster API and Argo CD
Benson Kwong, AWS Containers Blog
“In this post, we’ll show you how to pair Cluster API and Argo CD to streamline deployment and operation of multiple Kubernetes clusters.”
Running a private VS Code Extension Marketplace
Mark Milligan, Coder
“Coder has enterprise customers in regulated and security-conscious industries like banking, asset management, military, and intelligence where they deploy Coder in an air-gapped network. Accessing an Internet-hosted marketplace is not allowed.”
Decentralized social network Mastodon grows to 655K users in wake of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch
“Thanks to these new sign-ups as well as people returning to old accounts they had set up previously, the network now has 655,000 active users, the post noted.”
Make https work on gRPC in Rust: load a root certificate into the TLS config
Jessitron
“As far as I can tell, the ClientTlsConfig distrusts every certificate. It doesn’t seem to load the native certificates from the environment, like a civilized https client.”
Amazon Simple Email Service announces Virtual Deliverability Manager to help enhance email delivery success rate
AWS What’s New
“Virtual Deliverability Manager, a new feature that helps customers monitor and increase their email delivery success rates.”
The First Official Providers
Muvaffak Onus, Upbound
“Crossplane has the notion of providers that are the glue between Crossplane and external APIs, such as AWS and Azure. This glue takes a different shape for almost every resource in those APIs, so you need custom implementations in most integrations.”
ddworken/hishtory
“Your shell history: synced, queryable, and in context”
trietmn/go-wiki
“This is a Golang open-source module that makes it easy to access and parse data from Wikipedia (Wikipedia API wrapper)”
we-dcode/kubetunnel
“Develop microservices locally while being connected to your Kubernetes environment”
lwouis/alt-tab-macos
“Windows alt-tab on macOS”
chainguard-images/go
“Lightweight container image for building Go applications”
DevOps’ish Tweet of the Week
Notes
Notes from this week’s issue can be found on GitHub