A bug in Terraform? Or a misunderstanding of how a particular stanza works? Or maybe even our own automation around Terraform? — Hopefully, this is only part 1 of this series as it doesn’t really have a satisfying ending so far, but still a story worth sharing. We encountered an error in Terraform that was transient but seemed to go away on its own, most likely some race condition. This post is…

Inbox Zero is another one of those productivity hacks that you hear a lot about in tech circles. For those of us with an unread message count in the thousands, it sounds like a far-off intangible dream like faster than light travel or sensible gun laws. But after doing inbox…

NOTE: The views expressed here are my personal views and don’t reflect the views or position of my employer. The office is dead. It’s not dying or on life support, it’s just dead. The pandemic put it on life support and employers finished the job when they opened the doors…

Operations is one of those areas that many people in the company struggle to fully understand. The depth and breadth of responsibility varies per organization, with production support being the only thread you find consistently in companies. …

In my previous article I laid out some of the ground work for how I setup my team’s workflow management. …

Second-order thinking can help us evaluate the consequences of our consequences — One thing I’ve learned since having children is just how early in life many of the faults in humanity show up. Children are reflections of ourselves but in the purest form. …

Ticket management is one of those boring topics that comes up every now and again in OPS circles. A lot of teams that I’ve chatted with try to model their ticket management process after the development process using Sprints/Scrum. I’ve found Scrum to be limiting in an Operations setting. The…

Not long ago my wife and I received an email from our kid’s school. (They attend a CPS school.) The email was a survey of some sort that would be used to make decisions about curriculum in next year’s school program. …

I love meeting new people at conferences, especially when people are first time conference attendees. One of my favorite questions to ask is “What did you have to do to get approval to attend?” The question reveals a lot about their employer and the person’s direct manager. In many organizations…