Performance Matters (and Other Tidbits from the Trenches)
It’s been awhile since I’ve written. I’ve been busy coming up to speed as an SRE with an awesome team at LogDNA!
It’s gardening season up here in the Northern Hemisphere and while I was dealing with some trees and bushes that had died with a recent ice storm, I thought about the similarities in dealing with systems. Continue reading “Systems and Gardening”
Large numbers are difficult to comprehend. The national debt for example is kind of mind numbing. The fun article this week is about insane numbers; imagining the unimaginable.. Continue reading “Reading Week #5”
Monitoring the SRE Golden Signals, an excellent overview by Steve Mushero.. Continue reading “Reading Week #4”
Here are some interesting reads if you’re fortunate in having some extra time off this Holiday Season.. Continue reading “Reading Week #3”
Hacking thy self. Sharing some productivity tips that I use .. Continue reading “Works For Me #1”
First of all, Merry Christmas if you celebrate it, Happy Holidays if you don’t! This week’s interesting read is about a subject I love.. Continue reading “Reading Week #2”
I’d like to start a new series of articles based on interesting articles to read for the week.. Continue reading “Reading Week #1”
#WCUS happening this weekend. WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg news.. Continue reading “WordCamp US 2018”
Last week there were two earthshaking security events. Yes, the Marriott data breach was big, but I’d like to talk about the one you might not have heard of.. Continue reading “Last Week’s Security Earthquake”
This is off-topic, but I thought I’d share an image from a recent vacation. Continue reading “Off Topic #1”
We’ve been flying planes much longer than we’ve been running systems in production, so it might be instructive to learn what we can from our fellow aviators.. Continue reading “Checklists and Runbooks”
This is a limited time deal on 15 O’Reilly books for $15. Go. Buy. Right. Now! Continue reading “A Steal on O’Reilly DevOps/SRE Books!”
I first became interested in geolocating a few decades ago while designing an email filtering system for some customers and noticing that most of the “spam and malware” originated in half a dozen countries.. Continue reading “Geolocating Your Users”
I was lucky to catch most of the SRE track and Keynote speakers with the All Day DevOps event this year. Fortunately, if you missed it or want to watch some of the other tracks, the videos have been made available.
We want to learn things from any idea, test, change, upgrade or (heaven forbid) outage in production..
This book just arrived this morning and I’m just through the chapter on building SRE teams. Continue reading “Seeking SRE”
While most technical hiring questions aren’t all that relevant, this one might be more generally useful. Find duplicate files; the trick was the speedup.. Continue reading “Hiring Questions, Problem 2”
Learning a new computer language can be fun! Stretching ourselves to think about problems in new ways.. Continue reading “From the Get Go!”
Looking for help naming (and finding other uses for) a novel technique in detecting grey failures. Possible use cases are discussed here: load balancing, finding saturation points, alerting.. [ed. Decided on the name “Saturation Factor“.] Continue reading “Realtime Component Request Deficit”
Ask the right questions, listen carefully and make sure that you’re not hearing just what you want to hear.. Continue reading “Solving the Right Problems”
Some thoughts about handling critical system issues at scale.. Continue reading “Don’t Panic!”
We called our albino squirrel in the backyard, “Snowflake”..
As an SRE, I’m very fortunate to have had training as a pilot. There are many similarities to system operations.. Continue reading “Operations in the Cloud”
Building interactive commands that uses editing history and tab completion can be easy in bash and serve as a wrapper for automating tasks. Continue reading “Interactive bash Scripts”
Not just “Must Have”, but “Must Read!”. A new book has been released and is available, free to download for a short time. Continue reading “Must Have Books.. Another One!”
Most of the operations/engineering folks I’ve come into contact with will proclaim to be “vi” people and yet, when I watch them edit a file I cringe.. Continue reading “vi or emacs? Really?!?”
When we talk of CI/CD we’re often referring to Continuous Integration and Delivery while Optimization refers to Services/Systems. What I’d like to discuss is Constant Improvement/Continuous Development and Self-Optimization.. Continue reading “CI/CD and Optimization”
In a previous article, “There’s Always a Problem”, I described situations that can arise with the “Engineering vs. Operations” old way. The new way is a DevOps culture.. Continue reading “The DevOps Alternative”
I keep a large framed photo of this on the wall in my office to remind me what can happen when things go “off the rails”.. Continue reading “Preventing Trainwrecks”
A colleague of mine once posted a hiring question to ask prospective developers: “What is the least significant 10 digits of the series: 
.. 
?”