I learned this week that I’ve had Shingles since at least November. If you don’t know, Shingles is adult chickenpox and can suck the life out of you (get your kids vaccinated). I didn’t notice the first sign of shingles, pain, due to all the medications I’m already taking. I chalked up the fatigue to a busier than normal travel schedule. I had several opportunities to get the first outbreak looked at and didn’t. This second outbreak did get looked at and it is a wake-up call. The point is if you don’t take care of yourself, how able are you going to take care of anything else? “Every day is a new beginning, take a deep breath and start again.” —Unknown New Microsoft Azure Elastic Agent Plugin for GoCD With GoCD’s new Azure plugin, run your CI/CD pipelines on Azure virtual machines, and let GoCD scale up on-demand agents based on your need. Remove bottlenecks and reduce the cost of your agent infrastructure. ...

Life is more significant than tech. We all recognize this fact but, seldom do we internalize it and own it. This newsletter attempts to imitate life. Injecting needed doses of humanity and thought provocation into your inbox every week. People, Process, and Tools involves all facets of each. They’re in that order for a reason. I can load your inbox up every week with endless lists of tools. They aren’t going to fix your broken processes though. The people implementing those processes need to have their minds open to new ideas and methods. People implementing processes they have real ownership in using tooling they find real value in using will go further towards improving outcomes than implementing any new piece of technology ever will. My long-held opinion that technology should improve life is only a part of the equation. Technology by itself gives people a way to improve something. People do the actual improving. The care, education, and growth of the people in your charge are dependent upon you. Treat this great responsibility with the attention it deserves and you will go very far in life. ...

Docker confirmed they laid off folks. A source stated Docker closed their APAC office, laid off some developers, and punted some sales folks in Europe too. The source thought some managers on the development teams would be leaving soon as well. I have absolutely no real way of confirming that. But, all is well at Docker if you ask them. Things are so well in fact, that when a reporter reached out to Docker to ask about layoffs (based on a tweet from a random technologist), their PR team called the reporter to give them an “exclusive” interview with the Docker CEO to bury the layoffs. That’s totally normal behavior for a company that’s doing just peachy I guess. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Regardless, if you’re impacted and want help, let me know. In personal news, it appears my eight-year long appeal with the Veteran’s Administration has come to an end. As I mentioned in the Twitter thread, there’s a lot to unpack here. It’s been an overwhelming week and finding out life-changing news at the end of it is wild but on brand for 2019 so far. ...

Last week’s attempt at full automation failed and pointed out a shortcoming or two. I hope that’s all ironed out (time will tell). It also highlights the need to think of always starting from a clean slate. My theory is, a cached version of the newsletter was stored on MailChimp. When I enabled the automation for web site to e-mail, MailChimp observed 115 as new and shipped it. Hopefully, you get this while I’m sleeping and everything works wonderfully. Ha! I was in Raleigh and Durham this week for several meetings and collaborative efforts. A HUGE thank you to everyone that attended the Triangle DevOps Meetup on Wednesday. Y’all showed up in crappy weather before the most anticipated shoe blowouts of the year. Seriously though, thank you. I met some great people from far away lands and the discussion afterward was delightful. This week I’m holding down the fort outside Detroit. I plan on attending the Orchestructure meetup and you should come too! The week after that the family and I are on vacation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. If you’re there and want to grab a Mai Thai, let me know. ...

Last week, I enabled a workflow to automate more of the DevOps’ish process. One thing I did not test as a part of this workflow was link tracking. To be honest, I did not think it would matter. That assumption bit me hard. Within minutes, reports from readers came in saying Gmail was flagging the links in the e-mail as suspicious. As it turns out, disabling the link tracking also bypassed a bug in Mailchimp’s platform. When the automation kicked off with link tracking enabled it triggered the bug in the Mailchimp platform. My apologies for ever making you question the validity of the e-mails for this newsletter. The lesson I’ve re-learned here is never to trust your assumptions. Trust but verify all features. Mailchimp is working on the bug and gave me a very viable workaround. E-mail is hard, y’all. I’ve managed email delivery at a few companies now. If you think it’s easy, try doing it en masse, at scale. It’s a constant game of give and take that you win and lose at often. Mailchimp is a real delight to work with and I appreciate their support. ...