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Did you know that Chef had layoffs? I heard but I didn’t think much of it. This week I got a text from Chris Bailey who told me another friend got laid off from Chef. Well, that sucks. But, wait, I can do something about that, right? I’d like to introduce you to Mark Mzyk (LinkedIn | Twitter). Mark is an, “Engineering Manager looking for his next thing.” Mark handed over Triangle DevOps to Chris Bailey and I. He is incredibly organized, intelligent, and a good human. Mark has spent sixteen years in Engineering, the last three have been as a manager. Mark is looking for a new place to call home. The organization should have good leadership with a vision and morals that would make your mom proud. Mark is available immediately. I’d highly recommend you reach out ASAP. Spin up a Continuous Delivery server in less than 5 minutes Trying out new continuous delivery tools can take some time, so the team at GoCD created a quick start option for new users to spin up a GoCD server in under 5 minutes. Try now. SPONSORED ...

This week was Thanksgiving in the US. It was a holiday and I unplugged to a certain extent. I played games on my phone instead of working on various things and reading research. I took a little bit of a mental break the second half of this week (and I hope you did too if you could). This week, while most of the tech world is Las Vegas, I’ll be the designated survivor in an undisclosed location (aka Westford, Massachusetts). re:Invent is too big for me and too soft of a target for my frayed whatever you want to call it (nerves, anxiety, etc.). Have a great week! Spin up a Continuous Delivery server in less than 5 minutes Trying out new continuous delivery tools can take some time, so the team at GoCD created a quick start option for new users to spin up a GoCD server in under 5 minutes. Try now. SPONSORED The real story on container, cloud, and data adoption Poll results reveal where and why organizations choose to use containers, cloud platforms, and data pipelines. SPONSORED ...

It’s weird how things decay online. A 404 here, a failed git submodule update there can lead to weird things breaking. I noticed that happening with chrisshort.net. The site had gotten slower too despite it being a static site served through Cloudflare. I spent an evening looking for new Hugo themes. Testing their performance, figuring out what design would work best for me, and looked pleasant. Last night, I ended up picking the updated version of the theme I was already using. Today, I tuned it for a balance of features and performance. Then I went about tweaking the features to my liking. After cleaning up some 404s, I promoted the branch to master, and the CI was off and running. At what point was I doing web development? I don’t know. But, that’s how I got my second big job in tech. Internet Explorer (back when it was on a coveted CD) came with FrontPage Express. Say what you want about FrontPage. But, I knew how to use Microsoft Word and FrontPage Express gave me a WYSIWYG that showed me how to write HTML at the flip of a switch. Then I started writing web sites to W3C specs, discovered CSS, and ended up writing more web sites in Notepad then later jed and vim. ...

Self-care is important. It’s been a stressful past two weeks for me. This morning, I find myself reaching out to friends talking about anxiety (clearly mine isn’t being managed effectively). But, in the past two weeks, I’ve gone from uncontrollable pain to trigger point injection pain to soreness from coughing (weather). Finally, yesterday, I got some relief thanks to trying something different. But, I forgot to eat until 2 PM. It’s amazing how stress, anxiety, and pain can shut out all the other signals your brain is receiving. That’s why the newsletter is delayed again this week. Yesterday, it became clear that I wasn’t listening to my body due to the noise from all the other issues going on. At about 8:30, having already started the newsletter, I decided to relax. My body had finally found peace, so I let it rest. Take care of yourselves out there. Editor’s Note: Thank you to the folks that put my IBM Red Hat acquisition story on the front page of Hacker News this week. Stay up to date on the Red Hat acquisition with the DevOps’ish IBM Red Hat Acquisition Index. Thanks! ...

Last week I thought the 100th issue of this newsletter was going to be kinda flat. Not this week! Less than twelve hours after DevOps’ish 099 went out, the technology world confirmed change is constant; IBM to Buy Software Maker Red Hat for About $33 Billion. I think my friend and fellow Red Hatter Ben Cotton said it best, “It’s clearly a huge bet for IBM. But, they seem to be committed to letting Red Hat keep doing what has made them successful for the last 25 years. Only time will tell.” If you’re not in turmoil and you’re at a tech company consider yourself lucky. I have a great job, I have projects and programs to run, y’all still want Ansible so we’re still gonna work on it. I have long thought the thing I missed most about being in the Air Force was being a part of history every day. I get to do that for the second time in a lifetime. Hey, “At least it wasn’t Oracle.” ...