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It’s great to be working again. It’s refreshing to be figuring things out, collaborating with others in real-time, and keeping my skills sharp. This week I did a lot of the typical on-boarding stuff but, also needed to refresh my Ansible and Kubernetes basics. I practiced by working on a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster. I’ll talk more about this cluster elsewhere but, it’s amazing how rusty some skills get after a month and a half of not really using them. This week I will be in New York City for DevOpsDays NYC. I’ll be talking about testing certificate chains with Go. If you are attending please don’t hesitate to stop and say, “Hi!”. I promise I won’t bite and I probably will have some stickers to give away. GoCD — Open Source Continuous Delivery Server GoCD is a continuous delivery tool supporting modern infrastructure with elastic on-demand agents and cloud deployments. With GoCD, you can easily model, orchestrate and visualize complex workflows from end to end. It’s open source, free to use and download. SPONSORED ...

Is anything going on in the InfoSec arena this week? I couldn’t tell. If you have been under a rock this week I have some news for you. There are two vulnerabilities in CPU designs that essentially put everything we thought we knew about computer security on its head. Meltdown and Spectre are vulnerabilities affecting virtually all modern CPUs. I don’t think I could ever visualize a complete picture of all the vulnerable systems that are impacted. But, to put it in perspective, my first Windows PC was a used Dell something or other with a 486 DX2 66 MHz CPU I got back in 1995. If I still had it, I would not need to patch it. But, if you have a 120 MHz Intel Pentium CPU based system laying around, it’s impacted. The blast radius of these vulnerabilities is massive. Considering that, I am making a new section of the newsletter this week dedicated to Meltdown and Spectre. The reason for this is twofold: 1) There’s so much information in this space it could be a newsletter edition all by itself. 2) You might have some fatigue from these vulnerabilities. I don’t want you to skip over other awesome things in the newsletter. Scroll down past Tools for the Meltdown and Spectre section. Stay vigilant, keep your eyes open for patches, and rest assured Linus is PISSED. ...

The end of 2017 is upon us. Whether your 2017 was amazing or terrible I wish you all the best in 2018. I have very mixed feelings about this year. I feel like DevOps and open source software as a whole had a good 2017. I think 2018 will be quite interesting for this space. There will be numerous opportunities for open source software and its methodologies to continue to penetrate deeper into industries like the automotive and banking spaces. I don’t like to do prediction pieces typically (although I do read them). Feedback from DevOps’ish 054 led me to believe that further analysis was needed on a brief piece of commentary I made regarding Docker: Docker, Inc. is Dead. The name Docker, while it remains a command on people’s systems, is more the name of a company and commercial service offering now than a container platform. I thought that was clear in the post but I had to change the title based on feedback I received. All feedback is appreciated; trolling does not equal feedback. When I say, “Docker is dead” I am referring to the company, not the software. The software will live on in one form or another for a long time; the company will not. ...

I’m going to keep the monologue pretty short this week. I have some lightly scoped out ideas to share in 2018 though so don’t worry, lots more to come. It has been a rough week in the Short household and I’m mentally spent. But, there was a ton DevOps, Cloud Native, and open source of news this week. I hope you had a Happy Hanukkah or Happy Festivus and I wish all of you a Merry Christmas. GoCD — Open Source Continuous Delivery Server GoCD is a continuous delivery tool supporting modern infrastructure with elastic on-demand agents and cloud deployments. With GoCD, you can easily model, orchestrate and visualize complex workflows from end to end. It’s open source, free to use and download. SPONSORED People A look at 42 women in tech who crushed it in 2017: What a challenging, exhilarating year it has been for women everywhere, starting from the women’s March on Washington to former Uber engineer Susan Fowler’s eye-opening and now famous blog post to the #metoo movement that has swept the country, washing dozens of sexual predators out of their powerful roles in the process. ...

We have been totally buried by snow this week in Michigan. The daily snow forecasts have been underestimated by inches almost everyday. Not a big deal, it’s just a lot of powdery snow early in the winter. It’ll probably be a white Christmas here in the Detroit metro area. Meanwhile, the job hunt is an odd mix of hot and cold. To be honest, I was hoping to have something pretty solid coming back from KubeCon. The fact that something hasn’t happened yet I think can be firmly attributed to the time of year. No one wants to pull the trigger on hiring then go on vacation for the holidays. It’s fine, my calendar this past week has been full of calls so I’m not worried, yet. In the back of my head though, doubt creeps in. I tweeted the other night, “The worst part about job hunting is that it stokes the flames of imposter syndrome harder than any other venture could.” I found myself nitpicking job descriptions earlier in the week. I would find a single line that didn’t apply to me and throw out the position. I caught myself Wednesday night and realized having been in hiring that no one checks every box. If they do you better throw bags of money at them because they will be getting bombarded by legit, good offers every week. Patience is hard, especially this time of year. But, thinking about it, this break has been pretty good for mentally recovering. It might eat away at self-confidence but that’s probably a good thing from time to time. Mindfulness and perspective is key. ...