016: Week of 1490500800

Last Sunday, shortly after DevOps’ish Weekly 015 went out, Nicole Forsgren of DORA reached out on Twitter to demonstrate how easy it is to find great people in DevOps. This is Nicole’s list of great folks out there DevOps’ing: Alexa Alley Alice Goldfuss Amy Nguyen Amye Scavarda Aruna Ravichandran Ashley McNamara Betsy Beyer Bridget Kromhout Caitie McCaffrey Camille Fournier Cat Posey Charity Majors Courtney Kissler Courtney Nash Dinah McNutt Dominica DeGrandis Heather Mickman Heidi Waterhouse Ines Hegedus-Garcia Ines Sombra Jennifer Davis Jessica DeVita Jessica Hilt Jessie Frazelle Katherine Daniels Laine Campbell Lara Hogan Lisa Phillips Mandi Walls Megan Anctil Nell Shamrell Pamela Howell Phoenix Johnson Rikki Endsley Susan Fowler Rigetti Tuuli Bell Zee Alexander unpixie If Nicole Forsgren can bust out 38 awesome people DevOps’ing surely you can come up with ten. Share your ten awesome folks of #DevOps with me on Twitter. Nicole also started a “Ladies in #DevOps” trend in the process of sharing this list. Show people respect where it is due. Department of Choice Concepts Jacob Hoffman-Andrews was on The Changelog recently discussing Let’s Encrypt. It is a fairly journey through the birth of one of the most important projects of the last couple of years. ...

March 26, 2017 · 3 min · Chris Short

015: Week of 1489896000

I have recently taken over as a co-organizer of Triangle DevOps. In a meeting with the other primary co-organizer we talked a little about performance. DevOps considers network, code, system, and other aspects of performance. Yet, we rarely, if ever, consider what we can do to help the most critical part of our products; the front end. The customer cares the most about the interface they use for the products we facilitate. If we do not consider caching, CDNs, and asset utilization at some point in our journey are we doing DevOps justice? I would argue it’s not the job of development or design to consider global optimizations such as this. Don’t get me wrong, it would be awesome if someone else cared but so often it is not even a thought. This is a part of what DevOps is all about! Optimization, reduce costs, and gain efficiencies. DevOps is everything and everything is DevOps. Department of Choice Concepts Speaking of front end performance, Google just announced Guetzli. It can create high quality JPEG images with file sizes 35% smaller. ...

March 19, 2017 · 4 min · Chris Short

014: Week of 1489294800

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. ...

March 12, 2017 · 6 min · Chris Short

013: Week of 1488690000

I have been sick all week. I have pushed through it as much as possible but this was not a great week physically. However, there is plenty to discuss in the land of DevOps. Department of Data Defense The Amazon S3 outage is the big story of the week. How many of you were impacted by it. I was to a minimal extent. Our products have been architected for failure pretty well. There was a little work to be done during the outage to work around one issue. Aside from that my time was spent monitoring things anticipating the catastrophe to expand (which it did to an extent). This did not cause any additional burden on my teams and I though. Why am I not mentioning the reason behind the outage? Because it should not have been as devastating as it was. Folks, the cloud is still something you have to manage. Remember error budgets from Google’s Site Reliability Engineering book? You have to anticipate outages and down time for just about everything in this world. Your code should not depend on one cloud provider’s regional resource, ever. Diversify your cloud, folks! ...

March 5, 2017 · 3 min · Chris Short

012: Week of 1488085200

This week has been highlighted by multiple security events What an incredibly busy week news wise. No matter where you are in your DevOps journey it’s very likely one of the major events this week affected you. I am in the process of fighting off a sinus infection too so this week was a lot to handle. Department of Sane Workplaces Unless you live under a rock I am almost certain you have heard about the insanity Susan J. Fowler went through during her time at Uber. This shit is #NotOkay, folks, period. If you proposition your coworkers, you are in the wrong. If you harass your coworkers, you are in the wrong. If you cover up sexual misconduct, workplace violence, or any other human resource issue in your organization, YOU ARE IN THE WRONG. I have said this a lot in the past year, I did not spend 11 years in the military so ignorant jerks can harass people. You can read the incredibly well written piece by Mike Isaac for an impartial point of view. ...

February 26, 2017 · 3 min · Chris Short