Archives

A long and arduous week in the world of DevOps for me. The challenges of management are quite interesting. Trying to jump start DevOps initiatives, change technologies, migrate away from legacy infrastructure, as well as hire and manage people is grueling and exciting all at the same time. Then 💥 boom 💥 along comes the most arbitrarily timed, poorly planned project you have ever seen to throw a monkey wrench into everything. Remember The 6Ps, kids: Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Did I mention we closed on a new house this week and are having problems with our moving company? Life gets in the way, yet life always finds a way. You have to remember you’re not an electron, your path will not always be the least resistant one. If DevOps was easy, everyone would already be doing it. People Ops: It’s everyone’s job now by Charity Majors: Ops is the process of delivering value to users. Ops is where beautiful theory meets stubborn reality. ...

Sunday, I flew back to NC to help close and move out of our house. It has turned into quite the saga that I won’t bother with trying to explain to everyone. But, having injections on moving day was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. The world of DevOps was quite busy this week. Also, several great talks from GopherCon are available in various forms, including my GopherCon 2017 Lightning Talk: Golang to the rescue: Saving DevOps from TLS turmoil. Last, but not least, happy second birthday, Kubernetes! People Right Here, Right Now: 27 Simple Actions to Support Women in Tech: Below is a list of ideas. They require nothing but intention and time. They apply to men and women, people in leadership roles or individual contributors, people working for themselves or in companies. They won’t just benefit women, or even just tech, they’ll create a great environment for everyone. Charity Majors’ Mission to Monitor Microservices: Charity Majors knows first hand the pain every software developer feels upon releasing a carefully built and strenuously tested project into the wild — i.e., that moment where performance monitoring becomes virtually impossible. ...

I attended GopherCon in Denver this week (and visited System 76’s Denver office). It was an unbelievably positive experience. I attended as a diversity scholarship recipient (being a disabled veteran has *one *perk). I had friends there and met up with them the first day I was in town (I made a lot more friends as the week went on). I got to meet the wonderful Sarah Adams from Women Who Go at a welcome breakfast at Modern Market the first day of the conference. Sarah is an incredible person and her personality put me at ease. Sarah showed me that I was among friends at GopherCon. The conference organizers are the most down to earth and nicest people you could ever meet. Dave Cheney and I talked over breakfast one morning about the premise of my Lightning Talk and how *crypto/tls *in the Go standard library, “just works.” I have never been hugged at a conference before but I got quite a few hugs at GopherCon. The Go community is a truly great thing to be a part of. ...

This week was nuts. We dealt with a service degradation due to issues between our CDN and data center edge network. On a long, holiday weekend it’s the last thing you want to deal with. There were eighteen action items to come out of the post mortem (which was long enough to merit an executive summary). This was one of the weirder issues I have ever seen as it involved three different companies and a few bad hops in a network path. I quoted Baruch Sadogursky two weeks ago, “Pain is instructional.” It definitely is! Meanwhile, my company, Bankrate, was getting acquired by Red Ventures for $1.24 billion. Hopefully, the week ahead will be calmer. Doubtful given I’ll be in Atlanta on Monday, Denver on Tuesday, back in North Carolina on Sunday, and then back to Michigan later the following. Next week’s edition of DevOps’ish Weekly will be written right after the conclusion of GopherCon 2017! I’m attending GopherCon for the first time ever and am so thankful to have the opportunity to do so. If you’re there ask me for a DevOps’ish sticker. ...

Summer in Michigan is pretty interesting. Every lake with houses near it seems to have a fireworks display. There’s been fireworks displays since Monday. My poor dog, Sunny, is terrified of fireworks so this weekend we’re holing up in the basement. She’s heard a few pops today and is happily down here beside me snoozing. The world of DevOps is running full bore. Microsoft is making big moves. Kubernetes marches forward. Let’s Encrypt crossed a major milestone. Ubuntu is being shady. The NSA, Intel, and Verizon are all being naughty. Oh… And Detroit is still awesome. You should consider working with me. Let’s get to this week’s DevOps news! Full Stack Fest 2017: Problems of today, wonders from the future. Barcelona, 4–8 Sept. 2017 Are you a curious mind? Full Stack Fest is a week-long conference based in the amazing city of Barcelona that peeks into the web of tomorrow. Serverless, Blockchain, WebVR, Distributed Web, Progressive Web Apps… Come and see! Early bird tickets available with a 10% discount using the code DEVOPSISH. SPONSORED ...