On Protests

Sat, May 30, 2020 We’re often told that age brings wisdom, but I’ve often found that to be bullshit. The wisdom of age mostly appears to consist of submission to the inorexable weight of the world pressing on your spine until it snaps like a twig. Indeed, this wisdom asks us to make a simple bargain with the devil - evaluate the unknowable and infinite possibility of now arrayed against the volumes of human history and experience, and find that the now will always pale in comparison to the then.

Deserted Island DevOps Postmortem

Mon, May 4, 2020 In my experience, it’s the ideas that you don’t expect to work that really take off. When I registered a domain name a month ago for Deserted Island DevOps, I can say pretty confidently that I didn’t expect it to turn into an event with over 8500 viewers. Now that we’re on the other side of it, I figured I should write the story about how it came to be, how I produced it, and talk about some things that went well and some things we could have done better.

What is Observability?

Wed, Mar 18, 2020 You might have heard about observability and wondered what’s up with it – it’s a pretty complex topic! I helped put together a guide to it over at LightStep - be sure to check it out! Here’s the overview.

Adding the Mono repository to a Docker container

Mon, Nov 12, 2018

Running Debian 9 and need to install the mono repository? You’ll find advice for 8 that suggests using the following:

Good Posts

Mon, Nov 5, 2018

In which I curate a list of my good posts on social media in no particular order.

OpenTracing for ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI

Sat, Oct 13, 2018

Preface - I really like what Microsoft is doing with .NET Core and ASP.NET Core.

However, the horror they’ve unleashed upon the world in the form of ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI is a sin that will take more than a few moons to wash away. That said, quite a few people are still building software using this stuff and I got curious how you’d do instrumentation of it via OpenTracing. This post is the result of several hours of hacking towards that end.

Building Multi-Framework C# Libraries on CircleCI

Fri, Sep 14, 2018 It’s never been a better time to write cross-platform .NET, that’s for sure. I’m 100% MacOS using Rider and Visual Studio Code these days, and things work generally pretty OK. Obviously you’re going to run into trouble if you’re trying to touch any Windows-specific frameworks or libraries, but for the sort of backend and instrumentation focused code I’m writing these days, it’s not that big of a problem. However, there’s still some rough edges when it comes to running cross-platform projects in a CI system, especially if you’re using something that doesn’t have prebaked images.

The Cloud Is A Dumpster Fire, And That's OK

Fri, Apr 20, 2018

I spent the past couple of days trying to get the Azure Golang SDK and Slack to talk to each other.

In Defense of Browser Plugins

Sat, Apr 14, 2018

When was the last time you thought about browser plugins?

RethinkDB Load Balancing

Sat, Apr 14, 2018 Do you use RethinkDB? Do you have a cluster set up? Do you want to stop crushing a random cluster node with database connections? Do you wish someone had written some simple steps on “Hey, how can I set up an ELB on AWS to load balance my client connections to my RethinkDB cluster”? Wonder no more! Setting up a load balancer for your Rethink cluster is pretty straightforward - here’s how to set it up on Amazon Web Services.

About Me

Sun, Jan 28, 2018 Hey, I’m Austin. I’m a human on the internet, and I blog about software, devops, and some other stuff. This is my Twitter account. This is my GitHub. This site runs using Hugo with a modified version of the Hyde theme.

Automating Jira Ticket Creation with Python

Sun, Jan 28, 2018 Jira - love it, hate it, begrudgingly accept it - it’s a fact of life for many of us in the software world. One thing that particularly sucks about Jira to me is that there appears to be an eternal tension regarding process. You’ve probably got a boatload of various processes that you’d like to be somewhat repeatable and easy to discover. In my career, I’ve seen these processes be documented in a variety of places.

Developer Standups with Alexa

Sun, Jan 28, 2018 Since I joined the Apprenda team, the ritual of daily R&D team standups have been a pretty constant companion. Being able to to get a ten-thousand foot view of our progress helps keep everyone on the same page, even as our team has grown over the years. One of the rituals of our morning standups has been the deployment report, where we’re updated on how nightly tests and deployments of the Apprenda Cloud Platform have fared.