I have a lot to talk about this week. I’m putting sections in the introduction for ease of reading (feel free to skip parts you’re not mildly interested in). Also, thank you to this week’s sponsors; Replicated and GoCD! ChefConf 2018 The highlight of my week was being able to meet 1,400 new friends at ChefConf 2018 in Chicago. If you are ever wondering how to run an amazing event, look no further than the good folks at Chef. From a speaker’s perspective, I have never felt more prepared for a talk. The event itself was meticulously planned and executed. I presented my talk, DevOps is Not War to a standing room only audience. Thanks to the fantastic guidance from the conference’s speaking coach, Anna Boynton, I was able to take a forty minute talk and land it perfectly inside the twenty-minute time slot I had. The event morphed my bias of Chef from a niche tool to a formidable accompaniment of software to ease automation tasks. The messages from the keynotes were like those I’ve delivered to many audiences before, “You’re not an X company, you’re a technology company.” I highly recommend adding ChefConf 2019 to your schedules as soon as it is announced. ...

This has been a whirlwind week. On Sunday, we celebrated Mother’s Day. It was a good day where I tried very hard to give Julie the day off from the rigors of Max management. I had to bail a little before Max’s bedtime though to head to Cleveland for an SJ Technologies client visit. It was a great visit but it was, in military lingo, a turn and burn. I was back in Michigan by Monday night. I was working on a couple of tickets this week before heading off to ChefConf. One issue revealed a lovely little bug in Kubernetes (login required). I was attempting to mount a ConfigMap as a file in the root directory of a container and it was not working no matter what. It was awful and the workaround was thankfully easy enough due to the fact it was a web app and Caddy was available. I created an HTTP redirect and I was off and running. I submitted some additional bug reports where appropriate and was off to the next thing. Tripping over bugs is annoying. But, there’s a great Kubernetes community right here in Michigan: Orchestructure. Thanks to y’all for helping me out this week. ...

Assholes seemed to be the theme of the week. First, Rafael Avila de Espindola is leaving the LLVM project because it adopted a code of conduct and its support of Outreachy. Yes, Rafael is arguing that creating a framework to foster a more inclusive community and helping folks that have are at a significant disadvantage is against his “ethical views”. Next, infamous bad actor, Richard Stallman, vehemently opposed the removal of an abortion joke from glibc source code. The basis for the opposition? “The fact that this is not strictly and grimly technical is not a reason to remove this.” Because a GNU manual isn’t meant to be a “safe space” according to Stallman. Finally, Josh Pigford suggested that changing jobs every 12-18 months was a red flag for hiring. When numerous people called bullshit, Josh continually doubled-down even after someone pointed out Josh had ten jobs in a ten-year span. Instead of apologizing or better explaining his statement Josh hid behind the fact the responses to his comments were overwhelming and decided to “not look at Twitter for a few days” as a result. In my opinion, changing jobs every twelve to eighteen months shows you have a significant ability to learn and adapt. You will also have a significant experience advantage over someone who coasted somewhere for years because it was “comfortable”. All of these assholes were nice enough to self-identify. Make sure you remember who they are should you ever cross paths with them. The moral of the story is, we all need to be excellent to each other and helpful to everyone. If you are somehow against that for some reason then maybe you’re in the wrong line of existence. ...

My week started out great! Spring had finally sprung here in Michigan. But, with that came something I’m allergic to. Then that turned into a sinus infection. That has now expanded into a horrible cough. I have already had one doctor’s visit. But, it was a VA doc since I already had an appointment there. It might be time to see a real doctor. Free Webinar: Continuous Delivery with Docker, Kubernetes, and GoCD Docker and Kubernetes provide the platform for organizations to get software to market quickly. In this webinar, you will get a practical guide in designing a Docker-based CD pipeline on Kubernetes with GoCD. SPONSORED Events ChefConf 2018 Dates: 2018-05-22 through 2018-05-25 Join an awesome community of #DevOps and automation professionals at ChefConf in Chicago. I’ll be presenting, DevOps is Not a War. Save 10% with discount code Hugs4Chef. DevOpsDays Toronto 2018 Dates: 2018-05-30 through 2018-05-31 I’ll admit it, I’ve never been to Canada. But, I’m definitely going to DevOpsDays Toronto this year to present What the Military Taught Me about DevOps. ...

I had a lot going on this week. From dealing with bureaucracy at the second largest department of the US government to debugging Jinja2 code in Ansible playbooks to wrangling a toddler that isn’t feeling all that great to dealing with my constant nemesis; long thoracic nerve palsy and winging of the scapula. I have a lot on my plate all the time and I’m okay with that. I enjoy it most of the time. The trick to it all is balance. Like in DevOps, no one facet can take more of the time allocated to it than necessary. Sadly, that rarely works out and ends up creating debts. Managing the debt is the trick. I have the constant feeling of being behind on everything. But, if I can balance the figurative checkbook at the end of the week I’m okay with it. If your AWS bill is too high, too complex, or too horrifying to observe directly with the naked eye, talk to Last Week in AWS’s Corey Quinn. SPONSORED ...