Posts

Principles Of Design

A list of my pithy statements about designing systems. Eventually I’ll write explanations here.

Gnarly Sed

Last night I wrote a script to compute a Table of Contents for Markdown documents and insert it into the document. It handles both syntaxes for heading block...

Computer Architect

Something that often surprises people about a Software Architect1 role: it’s a people job. same can be said about my current “Cloud Systems ...

The 2nd Crypto Wars

This has been invisible to most people, but we’re now in what I call the “2nd Crypto Wars”. This is important, and your world will be impacted by it.

Staying Sane with IaC

Infrastructure as Code is all the rage, but suffers the same problems as any other code: it can easily become an unmanageable plate of spaghetti.

Terraform Workspaces vs SCM Branches

TL;DR: Workspaces and branches serve different purposes. An SCM branch is an alternet set of code. A Terraform workspace is an alternate location to apply...

Feeling Scrummy?

Description of a successfully implemented, fairly light-weight SCRUM process.

Guidelines for Modern DevOps

A list of guidelines for good DevOps, presented in the spirit of Shuhari Write your success criteria first. That way you know when you’re done. If you can’...

Project: Makessl

Makessl is a Makefile for GNU make that assists you in generating SSL keys, certificate requests, and (optionally) certificates.

Simple S3 Backup script

Announcing availability of a simple program to backup the output of commands to Amazon S3 storage.

Thoughts on running software

I’m partially on operations guy, so, net result, I’m responsible making software run. What exactly does this mean?

Introducing docker-xymon

In short: build and deploy this for instant monitoring. Seeing no viable containerization of the Xymon monitoring system (and the ‘net is large – I could h...

GIT for SVN users: An introduction

This is part of a series of posts about GIT for people with an SVN background. If you’re an experienced GIT user, my series of “GIT for SVN users” is likel...

VM Resources Page

I’m now a VM management and performance guy for a large amount of my life.

The problem with GIT

After a few months of using GIT, I realized one of my fundamental problems with git:

Tool of the Month: Puppet

Puppet is a tool for configuring a large number of machines by recipe and periodically checking that they are still in conformance. I have fallen in love.

LVM2 and Linux boot delays

In which I learn that sufficient logical volumes and/or snapshots can make a default Ubuntu Server installation unbootable, but there’s a very simple fix.

RXVT

This week’s tool: RXVT

Joel On Changes

Joel Spolsky wrote in "Choices = Headaches" in which he ranted (quite validly) for a while about the Windows Vista shutdown button. The problem is ...

Automount Snapshot

Summary: I present a method for transparently auto-creating lvm snapshots on use.

Raw Code

“Raw Code”, Lyrics by Dewey Sasser , with apologies to Dimitri Piomkin