Ten minutes. One huge topic.
I went into the Lead Dev conference with trepidation about doing a ten-minute lightning talk on the topic of “Better Incident Command.” This is a big topic, and I was whittling down the content for a forty-minute talk into a mere ten.
The magic of Lead Dev was such that it worked out better than I imagined.
The day’s talk track had been curated and shaped with a keen eye for the technical through-line. Earlier talks set the scene by discussing the bigger picture of site reliability practices, interpersonal skills in engineering situations, and the…
My dad died four days after my birthday.
There’s a bittersweet balance to that. I’m born; my father dies.
I’ve always been aware of mortality. I’d chalk it up to Calvinism but really, you can only blame so many things on Calvinism. For whatever reason, I was always pretty aware of my own expiration date. Then came the cancer diagnosis; getting cancer at thirty will certainly put you in mind of death. Not always in a productive way. You know: “My elbow feels a little funny… oh gods, maybe it’s elbow cancer. What are the survival rates for elbow cancer?”…
On February 23, 2015, I wrote this in a blog post draft:
It’s the end of February, and I slept with the windows open last night. A gorgeous Florida night: cool and humid, followed by an unusually gray morning filled with birdsong.
I sit here, preparing for the week, and wonder what it will be like to wake up in Portland.
It’s now May 0f 2016, over a year later. It feels like maybe 8 years later; the past year is a water-drenched sponge, expanding beyond its natural density. A gift of a year.
My blog posts, sparse as they…
Beth Adele Long
I write stories for humans and code for machines. Software Engineer @ New Relic, PDX denizen, nomadic homebody. Mx; she/her.
