As mentioned in last week’s Sunday Reboot, I’ve recovered a few of my old posts from the Wayback Machine—all from my time at the now shut-down Fixate.io (via their blog, Sweetcode). These are all freelance topics, so the style of writing is a bit different than normal (for me, at...
As mentioned in last week’s Sunday Reboot, I’ve recovered a few of my old posts from the Wayback Machine—all from my time at the now shut-down Fixate.io (via their blog, Sweetcode). These are all freelance topics, so the style of writing is a bit different than normal (for me, at...
As mentioned in this week’s Sunday Reboot, I’ve recovered a few of my old posts from the Wayback Machine—all from my time at the now shut-down Fixate.io (via their blog, Sweetcode). These are all freelance topics, so the style of writing is a bit different than normal (for me, at...
As mentioned in this week’s Sunday Reboot, I’ve recovered a few of my old posts from the Wayback Machine—all from my time at the now shut-down Fixate.io (via their blog, Sweetcode). These are all freelance topics, so the style of writing is a bit different than normal (for me, at...
As mentioned in this week’s Sunday Reboot, I’ve recovered a few of my old posts from the Wayback Machine—all from my time at the now shut-down Fixate.io (via their blog, Sweetcode). This is the first of those posts, which I believe was originally written for VictorOps but ultimately scrapped for...
About 13 years ago, I published a post on my blog titled How to Compile Envy MUD (while my archive page has it listed as the first post, it’s actually just the oldest one I’ve retained after years of prior publishing). While the process of compiling Envy MUD (or EnvyMUD)...
I’m attending KubeCon + CloudNativeCon this week, and while the conference itself has been excellent, I have discovered that I have completely forgotten how to be a competent packer. Silly me, I spent a ton of timing making sure I was packed appropriately for the weather, but forgot to consider...
Heroku’s been taking it on the chin lately for their response to what looks to be a pretty-damn-serious security incident—and for good reason, because their communication about the whole event has been abysmal.
A postmortem is the analysis of an event after it occurs. When an issue is encountered in a production environment, a postmortem is an important process that lets us reflect on and learn from our mistakes so we can improve our process and prevent them from happening again in the...
A few years ago, I checked off an item on my Open Source Bucket List when I pitched—and ultimately contributed—a brand new feature to HashiCorp’s Vagrant: command aliases. While aliases have been a core Vagrant feature for some time, there hasn’t been a lot of coverage about what they are,...
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...
As a developer, I’m a huge fan of continuous integration. For the uninitiated, continuous integration is a software engineering practice in which code changes are tested as soon as they are committed. This enables early problem detection. It also provides immediate feedback on code quality, allowing for issues to be...
I’m a huge fan of SequelPro, a Mac OSX application that provides an incredibly easy to use GUI for managing MySQL databases. Unfortunately for me, I’ve spent the past year working on a project with a Postgres database, so my easy-as-you-please SequelPro days are pretty much over. Thankfully, after about...
Full stack deployments are a relatively new concept to me. At first, I was confused as to why you would redeploy the entire stack every time, rather than just the code. It seems silly, right? My brain was stuck a little in the past, as if you were rebuilding a...
Automated Continuous Integration (CI), at a high level, is a development process in which changes submitted to a central version control repository by developers are automatically built and run through a test suite. As builds and tests succeed or fail, the development team is then aware of the state of...
When starting a project, working as an individual developer provides a level of development freedom that can get quickly complicated when it is time to grow the team. Once you expand to multiple developers, it is critical to maintain a well-documented and structured development environment. In a poorly architected environment,...
Vagrant is an amazing tool for local development, especially in the case of distributed teams. It allows for complete parity between every team member’s development environment without forcing anyone to follow a complicated list of environment setup steps. Vagrant’s plugin support is also excellent, as it provides for further automating...