How many times have you sat there trying to work through a technical problem, and thought: Is it OK if I interrupt someone else to get them to help me? Pretty much every engineer ever Since I work with companies that are in the process of moving to Cloud Native technologies, there is often a … Read more
Like many self-confessed geeks, I’ve long been curious about 3d-printing. To me, it sounds like the romantic early days of home computing in the 70s, where expensive machines that easily broke and were used as toys gradually gave way to more reliable and useful devices that became mainstream twenty years later. The combination of a … Read more
GitOps is the latest hotness in the software delivery space, following (and extending) on older trends such as DevOps, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD. So you’ve read up on GitOps, you’re bought in to it, and you decide to roll it out. This is where the fun starts. While the benefits of GitOps are very … Read more
Recently, while showing someone at work a useful Git ‘trick’, I was asked “how many ways are there to undo a bad change in Git?”. This got me thinking, and I came up with a walkthrough similar to the ones I use in my book to help embed key Git concepts and principles. There’s many … Read more
When I was growing up in an outer suburb of London in the 1980s, there was much talk of the decline of the city. In the future, we were told, we would all be working remotely via telescreens from our decentralised living pods. The economics and technology of the argument seemed solid. The Internet was … Read more
Recently I read two books I’d recommend that got me thinking about how the IT industry has changed in the last 20 years. These books are The Great Convergence and Capitalism Without Capital. First I’ll briefly describe the books, then go over some of the consequences of their theses for the global economy, and then … Read more
Previously, in 2017, I wrote about Things I Learned Managing Site Reliability for Some of the World’s Busiest Gambling Sites. A lot of it focussed on runbooks, or checklists, or whatever you want to call them (we called them Incident Models, after ITIL). It got a lot of hits (mostly from HackerNews), and privately quite a … Read more
Following on from previous posts on bash, here’s some more bash tips that are relatively obscure, or rarely seen, but still worth knowing about. 1) Mid-Command Comments Usually when I want to put a comment next to a shell command I put it at the end, like this: echo some command # This echoes some … Read more
Recently I (along with a few others much smarter than me) had occasion to implement a ‘real’ production system with Istio, running on a managed cloud-provided Kubernetes service. Istio has a reputation for being difficult to build with and administer, but I haven’t read many war stories about trying to make it work, so I … Read more
I hadn’t heard of Nam June Paik until I went to his exhibition at Tate Modern a few weeks ago. I left feeling sheepish that I hadn’t heard of him before I went. I knew a bit about Warhol and Duchamp, but had no idea there was another artist so far ahead of his time … Read more