About a year ago, I came across an Asus Internet Radio (Air) at a local Goodwill and, despite knowing nothing about it, felt that I just had to have it. Well… it should come as no surprise to anyone that, out of the box, it didn’t actually work. None of...
As developers, we like to think of source code as a recipe. All the steps are written out, so understanding code is as simple as reading those steps. But that’s not the way it really works, is it? Programming is an art form, and programmers each have their own unique...
I’m not gonna lie… it took me a while to adopt Docker. A devout Vagrant follower, Docker just didn’t feel mature enough to me until very recently, but boy have I seen the light. As a development environment, Docker has completely replaced Vagrant for me, but what really brought me...
Let’s face it, when it comes to endpoint management, automation is king. In our hyper-connected, ultra-virtualized, cloud-based world, there is no shortage of machines that we have access to and no limitation to the amount of infrastructure we can manage. But with new scale comes new challenges, and configuration management...
In 2001, the Department of Defense published MIL-HDBK-61A(SE), a 221-page military handbook offering guidance on the practice of configuration management to all military departments and agencies. While MIL-HDBK-61A(SE) is the government’s most recent contribution to the practice of configuration management, the Department of Defense itself has a long history of...
“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”
In 1983, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were awarded the ACM A.M. Turing Award “for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system.” In his acceptance speech, aptly titled “Reflections on Trusting Trust,” Thompson presented a now infamous hypothetical design for...
It’s hard to remember a time before package managers. A time when software arrived on a set of floppy disks in the mail or a compact disc in the back of a catalog. A time when finding software online meant visiting a half-dozen shady websites that may or may not...
I first discovered my passion for computers on the day my dad brought home our first family computer nearly 20 years ago. While it would be a few more years before that passion turned into an obsession bordering on insanity, the desire to create things out of intangible bits and...
Just over a year after the launch of Microsoft Windows 98, Apple Computer released the next and final version of their “Classic” Mac OS operating system, Mac OS 9. In typical Apple fashion, the months leading up to the release of OS 9 were marked by increasing hype, aggressive marketing,...
In the summer of 1998, Microsoft released the next version of their flagship Windows operating system, Windows 98. While Windows 98 is often remembered as the operating system that defined desktop computing for the majority of users in the late 90s, it included a particularly unique feature that changed the...
A couple years ago, I was working on a monolithic Ruby on Rails codebase that was fast approaching unmaintainability. In a month-long sprint of desperation, we hit the books and decided to come up with a plan. The solution to our problem arrived in the form of ActiveInteraction, a Ruby...
Let’s get this out of the way first: Magento is by far the single-most inefficient framework I have ever had the displeasure of working with. While I’ve made a similar statement about Craft CMS in the past, after a week working with Magento 2 I happily rescind my earlier Craft...
When it comes to running a multi-user dungeon, having to enforce rules is the worst. It’s a game, and most people are there to have fun, but from time to time every game encounters cheaters, trolls, and rule breakers. While banning these toxic users can seem like the easiest solution,...