A Game of Thrones-themed synopsis of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — Stephen R. Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is a staple amongst the productivity genre of self-help books. It was written over 30 years ago, yet it remains a best seller, often handed out at offsites or during company onboardings. The key to its success is not just…

Using Coder-OSS to demonstrate the power of Kubernetes-based development environments. — I have spent a decade in charge of development tooling teams. During that time, I watched the rise and fall of Vagrant and the introduction of Docker and a plethora of other build tools. I remember when most developers had two desktops under their desks, and I helped with the…

Success doesn’t happen by accident but through insight and planning. — I’ve led many projects over my career, and plenty of them were complete disasters. Some of them were disasters in spite of great planning, but the majority of my failures were due to faulty planning. These projects had great engineers with plenty of motivation and talent but failed anyway. However…

Applying technical leadership best practices to people leadership — Most software leads started their careers as software engineers who sought out, fell into, or got tricked into leadership. Do you see yourself in any of the following? You had a great idea, started a company, and are now leading a team of engineers building a product. However, you are…

Automating your ticket queue with self-service Terraform repos works for more use cases than you might think. — This post argues that IT and Technical Operations teams should use Terraform to add self-service functionality to the applications they support. For IT and technical operations teams, a significant source of support work involves using their administrative powers to create, update, or delete objects in tools like GitHub, Jira, Slack…

Picking the Best IaC CI Platform Much like the black plague or TikTok, infrastructure-as-code (IaC) has dominated the DevOps industry, with Terraform as the clear winner (keep dreaming Pulumi). Unlike cloud-specific IaC libraries (e.g. …

Layering multiple architectures for an ideal ecosystem — While trying to write a post about authentication, I waffled around various ways to tackle the subject. I started by trying to write an enormous post that covered all the aspects of authentication but barely finished the outline before I threw that idea away. …

Tips to build a cooperative team — Building a balanced team A good DevOps team consists of a strong commander, a wizard, a couple of builders, and a lineup of warriors. Why even bother with a metaphor like this — it seems silly, right? I believe that the strongest teams (both in role-playing games and in real-life) are made up of…

A look at SIEM management — Log monitoring is not discussed frequently enough. This is likely because most people think it’s simple — just write an alert to see if logs are flowing, right? If that works for your operations, great, but it doesn’t cut it when a security team needs to have true visibility of…