I spent the week in Orlando. The first two days for work and the last three for play. This is the second business trip the family has been on with me in as many months. It’s interesting to chaos test your travel routines with weird bookings due to work needs. I try to spend very little time proving who I am or what I do when I travel. I’ve had horrific experiences traveling and I go out of my way to reduce the chances of that happening. I’ve optimized for smoother sailing through government and security checkpoints. My family has no status or extra vetting. It’s amazing to see what happens when traveling with them. Throwing a toddler into the mix changes everything. All systems seemed to be geared toward not having a toddler meltdown. We often comment here in the US how all the “added” security post-9/11 is more theater than actual security. We all have stories of smuggling something we forgot to take out of a bag through security. This makes me wonder about how much of what we do might actually be more theater than anything. Dashboards are great but, if the most important dashboard a team has is the one that only leadership looks at (never used by anyone else) perhaps that’s more theater than improved outcomes. What else in our day-to-day operations is theater and not adding any real value to our work? ...

I spent the week in Austin at AnsibleFest. If you ever want to experience impostor syndrome put yourself in a room full of Ansible’s core contributors. It was exciting and terrifying every time I opened my mouth. But, for someone with Marketing in their title, the folks at the Contributor Conference were very embracing. The event itself was a whirlwind of various duties to include but not limited to MC, door duty at a bar, helping a developer understand Ansible internals, talking to customers, and trying to lighten the load on all the folks that put AnsibleFest together. Kaete, Carrie, and Leigh Anne did amazing work this year. I know it was not easy putting together an almost 1400 person conference. They pulled it off and made it an amazing event. Webinar: Actionable Continuous Delivery Metrics Want to deliver faster? Join our free webinar: Actionable Continuous Delivery Metrics. Gain insights into software delivery pipeline and learn to use metrics to improve your path to production. SPONSORED ...

I will be in Austin, TX Sunday through Thursday this week for AnsibleFest. If you are attending, please come say, “Hello.” and ask me for some DevOps’ish stickers, please. If you’re in the Austin area and want to grab a coffee, drink, etc. let me know. I’ll be in Orlando next week for some work and some play. If you’re around Orlando the week of the 8th, let me know. Remediation Strategy for Continuous Delivery of Microservices In systems based on microservices architecture, you have multiple services getting updated frequently. How do you respond when a deployment of a service introduces instability or bugs? Sheroy Marker offers some remediation strategies in this blog. SPONSORED Kelsey Hightower and Chris Gaun on serverless and Kubernetes Enjoy this episode of the O’Reilly Podcast, featuring a conversation on serverless and Kubernetes, with Kelsey Hightower, developer advocate for Google Cloud Platform at Google (and co-author of Kubernetes: Up and Running), and Chris Gaun, Kubernetes product marketing manager at Mesosphere. SPONSORED ...

Shortly after DevOps’ish 093 went out last week, Linus Torvalds rocked the Linux kernel development community to its core with his note to LKML, Linux 4.19-rc4 released, an apology, and a maintainership note. In it, Linus apologized, “to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.” Also, a Code of Conduct has been adopted by the Linux kernel development community. In my opinion, this is a welcome change. But, I can’t help but think this is WAY too little, WAY too late. The sickening amount of toxic behavior in the open source software development world has used Linus as its scapegoat for decades. Some people are decrying the new Code of Conduct as ushering in politics that will lead to the downfall of the kernel development community. Decades of deplorable behavior towards humans has led us to this moment. I can’t help but think of the Jean de La Fontaine quote, “Our destiny is frequently met in the very paths we take to avoid it.” I’ll posit their desires for an environment free of politics and humanism would have been better defended by actually adhering to the principles in the now dead Linux Code of Conflict. “Be excellent to each other” clearly wasn’t enough. There is so much to unpack here and it has only been a week. More to come for sure. A quick aside, I see a lot of parallels between the kernel development community and the current US political climate. ...

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. ...