When you have shared social activities in your office, really stop to consider if they're opt-in or opt-out. Opt-out activities can be exclusive for people who don't want to participate for whatever reason if there isn't an easy way for them to say no.
Read MoreNot all “allies” are created equal. Some thoughts on what allyship as ongoing behaviors might look like.
Read MoreAs it turns out, a bunch of people that I think are really smart and know a lot of things think that I know some things. It becomes logically inconsistent to still think I've got everyone fooled. How could people that are so smart be fooled by someone who doesn't know things?
Read MoreEveryone has different skills and strengths and individual responsibilities, but what everyone has is a shared responsibility to the customer and the company. We should be asking what can we learn from each other, and how can we use that to improve the customer experience even more.
Read MoreThe cloud is not DevOps. Configuration management is not DevOps. Shiny new virtualization tools and containers and frameworks are not DevOps. MongoDB in all of its webscale glory is not DevOps. Automation is not DevOps. These things can be (and frequently are) awesome when used appropriately, but all of the tools and config management and automation in the world cannot fix a broken culture or a broken mindset.
Read MoreThe more complex a system is, the more complex it becomes to accurately monitor the system. Each interaction between different parts of the system is a potential point of failure. Your monitoring systems will need to grow and develop alongside the systems they are monitoring.
Read MoreThe First Law of Yaks is that there are always more yaks than you expect. A tale of ec2 metadata, chef runs, and mongo elections gone awry.
Read MoreWhen all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when you find people abusing puppet exec in order to get their work done, you might want to rethink your permission scheme just a wee bit.
Read MoreSetting up a Zenoss event command to send a message to our NOC IRC channel, since that's where events and errors already get discussed.
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