How to Lose Friends and Alienate People
Communication is complex. It requires more than just words to be truly effective. Intonation and inflection are completely lost in the translation to digital form and misunderstanding happens in their absence.
I get more frustrated every day with the terse, cold nature of electronic discussion. I need a cleansing period. As of today, I am removing myself from all personal online interactions by going dark for the next month. I can’t go 100% offline because I work remotely, so communicating with my coworkers will be the one exception.
If you are weird enough to desire my presence, give me a call. Or just show up at my house.
Armchair Activism and the Misconception of “Good Enough”
Twitter has an immense ecosystem with incredible diversity. There are accounts for everything and for all types. Many people stick with a single theme and run with it. Comedians never break character; activists fight the good fight; others simply lament over or sing praises about their daily lives. It has helped launch fledgling businesses. It’s been wielded as a powerful weapon against social and ethical injustices.
SOLID Principles for Operations
SOLID is a mnemonic acronym for five basic principles of object-oriented design, originally coined by “Uncle Bob” Martin. From Wikipedia: “The principles when applied together intend to make it more likely that a programmer will create a system that is easy to maintain and extend over time.” While SOLID is designed to help guide developers, these principles can be very much applied to operations as well.
The Time I Got Arrested
It’s the summer of 2001. The sun is burning hot in the midday sky, the grass a most beautiful emerald green, and I just found my first love. It is a brown 1983 Buick Regal sedan with bench seats, a vinyl top, AM and FM radio, enough fake wood to re-panel a basement rec room, and shocks so worn amazing you’d have thought you were sailing a ship across a sea of clouds. In other words, this is one serious Chick Magnet.
Confessions of an Awkward Penguin
I have intense social anxiety.
I feel extreme discomfort when I am in a situation where I may have to interact with other people: grocery shopping; driving in traffic; going to the movies; even talking on the phone. My heart races, my hands get sweaty, and my head starts pounding. I can do pretty well with people or places I have known for a long time, but I am awful with new people and new situations.
The Ideal Monitoring Service
The state of monitoring solutions has been on my mind for a while. Today, the #monitoringsucks hash tag became a trend on my local Twitter feed. I’ve been working on my own monitoring app as of late, so I was inspired to put to words what my definition of the ideal solution should look like.
Programming is a science dressed up as art, because most of us don’t understand the physics of software, and it’s rarely if ever taught. The physics of software is not algorithms, data structures, languages and abstractions. These are just tools we make, use, throw away. The real physics of software is the physics of people.
Bash SSH Tunnel Wrapper
I recently became the caretaker of a Chef server that sits behind a firewall, inaccessible to all but the nodes that require access. Even though it’s locked down, I still need to be able to administer it. My tool of choice is knife, the command-line utility used to interact with Chef.
Agile Book Development
My wife is a writer. She considers herself the aspiring variety, but I disagree. Anyone who can actually sit down and puts words to paper (digital or otherwise) is certainly a bonafide writer in my eyes. Writing is hard - really hard, and I respect the hell out of anyone who tries their hand at it.
Never, ever, write in a vacuum. Show your work to people: friends, colleagues, reviewers. Check with your publisher to see how they want to handle this, but get feedback early, and get it often.
