General 9-11, war, and mental health warnings
This is hell week for me every year. The week before 9-11-2001, I lost my best friend. At the same time, mourning his loss in North Carolina still (I was stationed at Langley AFB, VA). I woke up early the morning after leaving the mountains and the funeral activities in Hendersonville. I was at my parents’ house. They’d taken time off the week before dealing with my dad’s mother’s (my grandmother’s) passing.
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In dark times, there are typically rays of light that can be found to give us hope. I read an article last weekend that I thought would be worth mentioning here this week. Will the coronavirus crisis, like Sars, give birth to the next big thing in China tech? looks at how the Chinese e-commerce giants Alibaba and JD.com got their start during the SARS crisis of 2002-2003. The coronavirus caused markets to tank this week.
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Everything is canceled, postponed, or going virtual. Coronavirus (COVID-19) has already made drastic impacts across the planet. Particularly this week, when several companies restricted travel forcing conferences to do something if they hadn’t already. KubeCon EU is getting pushed back to July or August. I canceled my plans earlier in the week because, with everything up in the air, there’s no telling I’ll be available to participate whenever it does eventually get rescheduled.
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There are terrible people in this world. I’ve known that for a very, very long time. There are those that twist religion to benefit themselves, double-crossers, and people who will have their co-workers swatted just for existing. But, you cannot add yourself to that list in the process of “being American.” You are the epitome of a loser if you target people because of their race, gender identity, political leanings, sexual orientation, or disability.
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I attended and spoke at DevOpsDays NYC 2018 this week. The conference was very well organized. It was a truly unique experience held at the Microsoft Technology Center in Times Square. There were some absolutely amazing talks. The talks were all great. The one thing I enjoyed the most was meeting people and seeing where they were along their journey. There are a lot of folks, some in really big companies, trying to change their cultures and improve their environments in dramatic ways.
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It’s great to be working again. It’s refreshing to be figuring things out, collaborating with others in real-time, and keeping my skills sharp. This week I did a lot of the typical on-boarding stuff but, also needed to refresh my Ansible and Kubernetes basics. I practiced by working on a Raspberry Pi Kubernetes cluster. I’ll talk more about this cluster elsewhere but, it’s amazing how rusty some skills get after a month and a half of not really using them.
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Is anything going on in the InfoSec arena this week? I couldn’t tell. If you have been under a rock this week I have some news for you. There are two vulnerabilities in CPU designs that essentially put everything we thought we knew about computer security on its head. Meltdown and Spectre are vulnerabilities affecting virtually all modern CPUs. I don’t think I could ever visualize a complete picture of all the vulnerable systems that are impacted.
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Happy Veteran’s Day (in the US)! Thank you to all those that have served. I appreciate everyone that took a moment tweet, text, and call me to thank me for my service today. This week, I found a picture with two meanings: 1) Thank you veterans, 2) the basics are SO important. When things get hard you revert back to habits be they bad or good. In basic training, you develop a sense of what to do in almost every situation.
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If you follow me on Twitter, you know I spent the first half of the week in Raleigh attending All Things Open and hanging out with my opensource.com family. All Things Open is one of my most looked forward to conferences of the year. I had already committed to attending before I moved to Detroit and I’m so glad I was able to go. One of the coolest things I did while there was announcing a new Opensource.
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Build versus Buy? It’s a question I usually asks candidates during interviews. There is really only one good answer; buy until you can build it better for cheaper. This doesn’t mean outsource everything. This doesn’t mean you won’t be hacking together cool things. It means that you have the business sense to know that you have core competencies that are either still forming, your team is small, or you have enough to manage in-house already.
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