I hate writing resumes in part for the same reasons I hate self-reviews. It can be really difficult to remember what I’ve done in the past. It’s easy to remember most of the big things like promotions, projects I loved, or hitting rough patches. But over time everything else tends…

Today I integrated my origin border service with the Cloudflare Origin CA API to dynamically provision, rotate, and revoke service certificates. Now our border uses short-lived secrets without involving any human hands, or writing any certificates/keys to disk. Here is the project: gotopple/cf-origin-cert Dynamically provision, rotate, and revoke server certificates with Cloudflare Origin CA API. — gotopple/cf-origin-certgithub.com

I work out of coffee shops. There is something wonderful about the simultaneous human proximity and loose coupling with my surroundings. I’m alone with my laptop without being alone. That is the sweet spot for my productivity. I hangout for hours, so as you might imagine I drink more than…

I’ve heard and put into practice several strategies for “winning arguments” or influencing people over the years. Some of the best advice was the most simple: stop talking and listen. I’ve always felt like that was incomplete guidance. I’m 36 years old. Like most people my age, I’ve “worked with”…

Orchestration is the act of creating and managing the resources, workloads, configuration, and data in an environment or set of environments in support of business operations and production. …

TL;DR IMO Kubernetes is a database and it’s positioned well to help eliminate several of the other operations databases hanging around our stacks. Doing so would be great for the consumer as long as engineering and the steering committee can pull it off. — by Jeff Nickoloff — Topple, August, 2018 I’ll be the first to say that I’ve been very critical of Kubernetes over the last few years. One of my jobs as a consultant and engineer is to represent the interests of technology adopters in reviewing and evaluating projects and products on…

Engineering and language are funny, because naming is hard. I’m going to pick on “Immutable Infrastructure” a bit. There is a huge difference between infrastructure that you cannot change, and infrastructure that you promise not to change. Outside of hardware I’m not sure I’ve ever seen “Immutable” infrastructure. …

Docker’s multi-stage builds are a nice-to-have since so many other packaging workflows developed in their absence. But I thought I’d start introducing people to them with a few practical examples. Anyone using a language capable of producing statically linked binaries has the opportunity to package based on “scratch” (the empty…

I like to start most projects with a proof-of-concept (PoC) sprint. If I’m building a service I prefer to PoC a client first. This helps me both understand an adopter’s use-cases as well as reduce the likelihood of gaps in the API in development. Next I might create a mock…