Observations on Technology from an Aging Geek
Today I have the absolute privilege to give a presentation at this years All Things Open conference in Raleigh, NC. This year marks the 12th edition of the conference. I’ve been fortunate enough to attend 4 including this year. However, this is my first time to speak. I’ve spoke at numerous conferences in the past, … Read more
Are you an engineering manager or DevOps engineer supporting teams working in a monorepo? Do you happen to use GitHub for source control? If you answered yes to both those questions, read on! The Need We have recently migrated our monorepo from self-hosted BitBucket to GitHub. As part of the migration, we were looking for … Read more
The daily scrum stand up meetings need to end. – Me, for the last 5 years There, I said it. Actually I’ve been saying it for a long time but most in software engineering leadership and project management don’t want to hear it. The vast majority of the daily scrum stand up meetings that organizations … Read more
Technically, automation actually broke the day first, but if it weren’t for the automation and backups, I would have been in a world of hurt. Let me explain. I currently have a Docker Swarm consisting of 6 Ubuntu server VMs spread over 2 physical Dell servers. This is my “production” cluster that run things that … Read more
This post is part 2 of a series on how you can take advantage of processes and tooling that large public open-source projects have developed to build a foundation that will help you scale your engineering organization and better take advantage of each engineer’s talents to meet your engineering goals. You can read the entire … Read more
I’ve been a geek for the vast majority of my life. My family got our first computer when I was 13 (a Commodore 64 to date myself). I started my “programming” journey by typing in pages and pages of code from the C64 magazine. Along the way I learned how to debug what I’d typed … Read more
This post is part 1 of a series on how you can take advantage of processes and tooling that large public open-source projects have developed to build a foundation that will help you scale your engineering organization and better take advantage of each engineer’s talents to meet your engineering goals. You an read the entire … Read more
There’s an inside joke among software developers that goes something like “naming things is hard.” That’s certainly true. I can’t count the number of times I’ve stared at my screen trying to figure out the perfect name for a variable, document heading, team name or any number of other things over my career. As I’ve … Read more
Well, at least partially. Since there are so many different ways that could be interpreted, let me explain. I’ve worked at home almost all of the last 14 years as both a full-time employee and freelance programmer–a good chunk of that that time in both roles at the same time. That means a LOT of … Read more
Wowzers! It’s been 10 months since I create a post on my blog! There is a good reason for that, I promise. I’m obviously not a prolific blogger like Ray Camden or some of the other folks that seem to be able to churn out blog posts as often as some of us sneeze, but … Read more