Busyboxes-as-a-Service
As a long-time poster, I invariably spend a lot of time thinking about internet harassment.
Everything Breaks: Dev Tools and Breath of the Wild
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is Nintendo’s most recent main-line game in the long-running Legend of Zelda series, launched on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986. To say that it’s a departure from the norm for the series is somewhat of an understatement – in lieu of a crafted series of puzzle dungeons that require specific tools, techniques, and resources presented in a fairly linear fashion, it instead offers an open world after a short introductory section, allowing for massive amounts of freedom and flexibility in exactly how players choose to engage with the game. As you may expect, this has lead to several unintended side-effects.
botw speedruns will forever blow my mind pic.twitter.com/FYJx1512QZ
— Tylor (@theSirToasty) August 21, 2020
The Commodification of DevOps
“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”
The Agile Manifesto, 2001.
It’s been quipped more than once that most amazing Silicon Valley innovations are simply a bunch of nerds poorly recreating a service that already exists, but with an app. While I find this to be in some ways a truism (after all, there is nothing new under the sun), it’s a fairly trite observation. What’s far more interesting is how the organizations that build and deliver these ‘innovations’ themselves develop, and the process of that development is especially interesting due to the pressure-cooker of free money and labor elasticity that has characterized the ‘startup economy’ over the past twenty years or so. What’s any of this have to do with DevOps, you may ask? Simply this – DevOps is a reaction to the commodification of Agile, and the rise of SRE is a reaction to the commodification of DevOps. To reduce the thesis further, many of the trends you see in software development and delivery can be understood as a cyclical reaction to anarchists running headlong into the invisible backhand of the free market.
Virtual Events Suck.
I mean, is this even up for argument?
On Protests
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
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?
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
Running Debian 9 and need to install the mono repository? You’ll find advice for 8 that suggests using the following:
Good Posts
In which I curate a list of my good posts on social media in no particular order.
OpenTracing for ASP.NET MVC and WebAPI
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
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
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
When was the last time you thought about browser plugins?