The Climbing Paradigm Shift Whenever I go to my local bouldering gym on weekends, I often see a mix of gym regulars, like me, and newbies who are trying out bouldering for the first time. Before they can get on the wall, the newbies are given a quick brief by a staff member, which…

In our experience, many companies tend to have at least one very large, bastard codebase touched by many developer hands at once. If you work for a large enterprise, chances are that your organization has a monster app featuring a codebase that is touched by many developer hands at once…

When I first posted about Ephemeral Release Forking (ERF), I knew that I was opening up a can of worms. After all, Git branching strategies are polarizing. Everyone and their uncle’s goat has an opinion about branching best practices. And here I am, with yet ANOTHER opinion on branching best…

DevOps at Enterprise Scale: It’s Complicated Most large organization are complex, with many moving parts. They’re often made up of multiple teams, and have multiple technology stacks, running on multiple platforms. This results in anywhere from ad-hoc to complex implementations of CI/CD pipelines. Most DevOps experts assume that organizations are flat, and this assumption goes into…

The other day, a recruiter sent me a job description for an SRE Manager role. Some highlights from the JD: The best candidates will have both strong bare metal Linux / Systems expertise and proven Cloud Architecture & Operations skills. Deep understanding of the Linux Operating System, including: Kernel, Memory, Process…

I love rock climbing. I’ve been climbing since 2002, and over the years, climbing has turned into a family activity. One of the things that I love most about climbing is that it’s all about solving hard problems. Climbing is about getting to the top of the wall without falling…

While scrolling through LinkedIn last fall, I came across the following post, in which the author enthusiastically asked, “What does a DevOps Engineer need to learn? This DevOps roadmap is very useful. What do you think is missing here?”

A COVID-19 Tale This week, after months and months of waiting for COVID-19 vaccines to reach the masses in Canada, vaccine distribution has finally shot up. And of course, when you’ve got tons of anxious people waiting for their dose of liquid gold, you need a good system in place to allow people…

This story first appeared as a guest post on Translucent Computing’s blog. The world has gone digital, whether we like it or not. When I was a kid, I remember my parents having music on records. As I grew up, records were eventually replaced by cassette tapes, then by CDs…

IaC on the brain I’ve always been drawn to the idea of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Back in 2014, I took on a role whereby I had to help a team install a new version of a vendor product. That included not only installing the new software, but also included provisioning new hardware. Since…