DevOps LA on Aug 27th
I've been invited to speak at DevOps LA on Monday, Aug 27th. The title I've chosen is "The DevOps Transformation" but it will not be the talk I gave at LISA. Partly because I've already given that talk, and partly because I only have a 20-30 minute speaking slot. I'll be looking beyond those fundamental principles and considering some new material, including work flow, routing, and conversion with the LEAN world at large. I will not ...
BayLISA Comes to Joyent: A Night of SmartOS
This Thursday night, Aug 16th at 7:30PM in Joyent's HQ (9th Floor, Embarcadero One) Joyent will be hosting BayLISA for an evening of SmartOS. I'll be filling in for Ryan Nelson, talking for 20 mins about the practical issues of SmartOS deployment. This is an excellent opportunity for any Solaris or SmartOS fans in the Bay Area to come an meet some amazing engineers and learn more about the future of the platform. Register here. (If I ...
Back to Blogging
My blog has certainly suffered a slow down in the last 2 years... I thought I'd provide a little insight as to why, give you a little insight into where I'm at these days, and ask for your suggestions on the future. Once upon a time, my blog was a predominately Solaris blog. In fact it became over time the most read Solaris blog. Thanks to Google it actually still is, because I have verify few active readers, the vast majority come to the ...
Konsidering Kanban
Kanban has become an increasingly popular "agile" technique which is consider as similar to Scrum and Extreme Programming. David Anderson created the agile form of Kanban from his experience in Japan. In his book he tells the story of his visit to the Imperial Palace Gardens where there is no admission cost, but the flow of visitors is constrained by a stack of kanban (cards), people can enter until the kanban are exhausted, then as people ...
Policy & Process in the Blood
I'm highly introspective... far more than I would actually like to be. I'm one of those strange individuals to whom if you said "Do you realize your being a jerk right now?" I'd actually admit "Yes, I'm sorry about that, I'm trying to find a way to rectify it unsuccessfully." Despite that obsessive level of awareness, nothing can tell you more about who you are then your children. In particular, by observing things your children do that ...
Sending Email with Attachments from the Command Line
I have lots of awesome CLI based reporting tools. One was so awesome that other people in the company wanted to get it on a regular basis but they preferred to see it as CSV so it could be manipulated in Numbers or Excel. Modifying my report to output CSV was easy, I just added a conditional that replace my pretty column formated printf() with an ugly comma separated printf(). Sending CSV in email is easy, just pump it into ''sendmail ...
LISA Keynote 2011: The DevOps Transformation
Last week I was given the incredible opportunity to not only speak at LISA but to deliver the opening keynote. I hadn't expected to even go, but when I learned the topic was DevOps I made a last minute plea on the eve of the submission deadline for a slot to deliver a talk I was calling "The 60 Minute MBA", a history of Operations Management. My hope is that I could get some obscure timeslot so a handful of people could geek out with me on ...
Using Graphite to Graph DTrace Metrics: Part II
In a previous entry I described Graphite and gave an overly simplistic example of integrating it with DTrace... lets get a little more serious and see what fun we can have. For a years a problem nagged at me. I wanted to get really fine grained latency information from an NFS server to track user experience. This isn't an easy thing to do, especially for hundreds of exports. First off, you have to use DTrace to get that kind of data, ...
CEO of NeXT Computer Dies
Steve Jobs was many things to many people. He liberated the innovations of XEROX PARC and brought them to the masses through yet more innovation. He brought style together with technology and forged an unending bond between the two. Apple has revolutionized the world multiple times over 3 decades under his leadership, and proved that it was his leadership that made the difference when the company almost failed after his leaving. On and ...
Solaris Family Reunion: TOMORROW!
Sorry for the late notice, but all you folks out here in the Bay Area for OracleWorld won't want to miss out on a very exciting event tomorrow night: What? Solaris Family Reuinion Where? Joyent HQ, 345 California St, 20th Floor When? Tuesday Oct 4th, 6PM till 10PM (and maybe a pub after that!) Why? Beer! Food! Community! Register here: http://smartos-estw.eventbrite.com We've all gone off in different directions, but this will be ...