Approaching System Monitoring
Previously, I raised the question: “If you were IT and walked into a company with no monitoring or logging, what would your priorities be?” If I were in this situation, I would ask myself three...
View ArticleOne Mom’s Way of Getting Things Done
For work study (or something like that,) I’ve been working on my school’s help desk. I find alot of humor in the way people behave when they feel that they “need” something to get done. For example, I...
View ArticleControlling Django Apps with an Init Script
If you’re reading this, you probably already know that an init script is a specific style of script that allows you to control daemon processes. In particular, they are used to start processes at boot...
View ArticleCommon Single Point of Failure: People
Yesterday, when I arrived at my other job on my school’s help desk, I found out that my supervisor was not coming into work at all. This is OK; I enjoy the autonomy of working unsupervised. However, at...
View ArticleAmazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS) – The Black Box From Hell
One morning I woke up early and checked my email. My plan was to check that my inbox was empty for some peace of mind and then go back to bed for a few more hours (I love Sundays). But that isn’t what...
View ArticleProblems at Scale
Over on HackerNews, saturn wrote that: Cloud computing scales the efficiencies, yes. It also scales the problems. This is exactly right. Problems in simple architectures are relatively easy to solve....
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Stop Letting Technical People Get Away With Social Ineptitude
As a technical person who has worked many customer-facing support roles, I’m offended by the often-cited notion that technical people have poor people skills or are poor at filling customer support...
View ArticleHypersensitivity and Political Correctness
I wrote a blog post this week on how engineers or “technical people” don’t have to, and shouldn’t, be jerks. My argument was that the stereotype that technically-minded people are bad at social skills...
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Concurrent Engineering: The Foundation of DevOps
DevOps is all about trying to avoid that epic failure and working smarter and more efficiently at the same time. It is a framework of ideas and principles designed to foster cooperation, learning and...
View ArticleWe Have the Tools but What About the Techniques?
In my previously-written article “Concurrent Engineering: The Foundation of DevOps” I wrote “just because you use puppet does not necessarily mean your organization is practicing DevOps.” I didn’t...
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