This week was REALLY hard. The past two weeks are the anniversary of the worst two week span of my life. In 2001, I was working like a dog at Langley AFB, VA. It was great work but the hours were LONG. With a normal shift, training, and other fun outside of work hours military things there was a lot going on. Then my grandmother died. Not earth shattering but it was another ratcheting up of the stress levels Then I got very sick. I had to seek treatment in an ER after work one day for flu-like symptoms. September 7, 2001, the day after the ER visit, I learned one of my best friends had passed away overnight at the age of 20. I had recently seen him a couple of times the previous weeks between visits to UNC and him to Newport News, VA. On the way to the funeral, I completely broke down when passing the highway exit towards Chapel Hill, NC. ...

Elon Musk is a weird dude. Amidst the SEC probing into his tweet about taking Tesla private, ol’ Elon decides to smoke a blunt on a podcast with Joe Rogan (the memes are amazing by the way). Not the smartest move. The only thing dumber that happened this week was Alex Jones at the US Capitol accosting Jack Dorsey. Did you know Dorsey fasts every day? Alex Jones is so dumb, he pisses off hangry people. What a maroon. The one person that said keep Alex Jones on the platform doesn’t eat during the day and Jones pisses him off. The moron got banned that day. What a weird week. In other news, two incredibly close and amazing friends of ours (both were in Julie and I’s wedding) will be participating in the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Light the Night 2018. They have done this year after year regardless of what was going on in their worlds. To quote our friend Kim, “This year will be extra special because we have a new nextdoor neighbor, Maya (3rd grade), who is a leukemia survivor and she will be joining our team and walking with us! 2 survivors on 1 team! Both Sara and Maya’s family speak at length about how amazing LLS was to them during their treatments and how LLS continues to be a beacon of hope for so many.” ...

It’s one of our rare long weekends here in the US. I’m trying really hard to have a good time and not ruin any great moments. There’s a lot I could be doing but, I’m holding off to help recharge. I hope you are taking a similar break is you’re able. A lot of good stuff in the works here for you. First, DevOps’ish has teamed up with O’Reilly to provide discounts on all manner of O’Reilly content, books, ebooks, events, and more. More good things will come as a result of this partnership (stay tuned). Webinar: “Want to successfully adopt DevOps? Change Everything.” Moving your organization to a DevOps culture isn’t as simple as buying a tool. It requires changes to many parts of your process. In this webinar, Ken Mugrage will walk you through four changes you can make in your organization to help you “Do the DevOps”. SPONSORED Correlate request traces, metrics, and logs Seamlessly navigate between logs, metrics, and request traces for a clear view of all your systems. Visualize and alert on metrics in real-time with anomaly and outlier detection. Try Datadog’s full-stack monitoring for free SPONSORED ...

The past few weeks have resulted in iterative improvements to my office workspace. After visiting a few Red Hat offices, it dawned on me that my office wasn’t what it should be. The improvements have helped me mentally in numerous ways. They’ve also allowed me to think more broadly about a number of things. Some odd little nuggets related to DevOps’ish popped out too (sausage making follows): Automation: This newsletter relies more on automation for content curation than you might realize. Recently, I’ve realized I’d like to run that automation more reliably with more granular controls. A switch from IFTTT to Zapier took place after I couldn’t determine why Corey Quinn’s Last Week in AWS was breaking my automation. Corey’s site was making a malformed URL. IFTTT gives little in the way of logging or event details compared to Zapier. So one evening this week I migrated everything. The Return of the RSS Feed: A lot of my reading had moved away from RSS feeds after the death of Google Reader. But, the dust finally settled in that world I have embraced RSS again in a big way. Cleaning out IFTTT showed me how much my reliance on it to parse RSS and send me e-mails had become. All of those RSS feeds moved into my inoreader. Then it dawned on me, “This is hypocritical.” I originally turned off the DevOps’ish RSS feed to get more people to subscribe to the e-mail newsletter. That ‘gamble’ paid off. There are now over 2,000 subscribers to DevOps’ish weekly e-mails. Not having an RSS might have helped reach that number a little faster. But, it’s not open and focuses more on the business side of things and less on the user experience. Time for that to change. ...

This week’s newsletter is a day early. I’ll be moving my daughter into college Sunday and Monday. It’s a two-day process because southeastern Michigan isn’t as close to southern Ohio as you’d think. I’ll be in Dayton on Sunday and Cincinnati on Monday. Lemme know if you’re around. Blog Series: Continuous Delivery of Microservices - Parts 1 - 5 This blog series from Sheroy Marker cover the principles of CD of microservices. Get a practical guide on designing CD workflows for microservices, testing strategies, trunk based development, feature toggles and environment plans. SPONSORED Correlate request traces, metrics, and logs Smoothly navigate between logs, metrics, and request traces for a clear view of all your systems. Visualize and alert on metrics in real-time with anomaly and outlier detection. Try Datadog’s full-stack monitoring for free SPONSORED eBook: Building Continuous Delivery Pipelines Learn the steps required to plan and implement a CD pipeline in your organization, including the benefits and best practices. Download eBook SPONSORED ...