Chris Short

ARPANET (the precursor to the internet) was built to connect scarce computing resources across the country to foster research and development. It’s designers say that it was never designed to survive a nuclear attack rather, it was built to work around flaky network links of its era. The Internet of today is powered by the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing protocol. BGP is powerful as it shares information throughout myriad locations about how to send traffic from one part of the internet to another. [Read More]

While I was at GopherCon 2017, it became clear to me that there was no Go Meetup group in the Detroit Metro area. When I returned from Denver, after obtaining sponsorship from Bankrate, Detroit Go Meetup came to life. Immediately after launching, Steve Marsh reached out to me about helping co-organize the meetup. Within a day, Detroit Go Meetup had another organizer and corporate sponsor in StockX. Within the first forty-eight hours, our first meeting and speaker announcement came out. [Read More]

UPDATE: According to Kara Swisher at Recode, Google has fired James Damore, the author of the memo that is the topic of this article. On Friday, August 4, 2017, several Google employees took to Twitter to discuss a ten-page document that was circulating internally at an alarming rate. The manifesto focused on the topic of “ideological diversity” replacing Google’s current diversity policies. The author states, “Women on average show a higher interest in people and men in things. [Read More]

Video of all the GopherCon 2017 talks are now available. Fifty-eight videos in all; it’s almost like being there. You can watch Ashley McNamara’s goosebump inducing talk, Kris Nova’s refreshing take on purging technical debt from kops, or Sam Boyer’s dep talk. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); My lightning talk, Golang to the rescue: Saving DevOps from TLS turmoil, is also available. Give it a watch when you have a moment. [Read More]

This talk was derived from an opensource.com article I wrote in April 2017, Golang to the rescue: Saving DevOps from TLS turmoil. Presented at GopherCon 2017 as a Lightning Talk. Source for the talk is available on GitHub. Introduction Chris Short Manager of DevOps at Bankrate opensource.com and DZone Contributor Contributed to The Open Organization Guide to IT Culture Change DevOpsDays Speaker and Organizer DevOps’ish chrisshort.net @ChrisShort Notes: [Read More]

The open organization community at Opensource.com (of which I’m a member) is pleased to announce the immediate release of its newest book, The Open Organization Guide to IT Culture Change. As IT teams around the world rise to these new challenges, they’re realizing that radical change isn’t a matter of tools alone. It’s also a matter of culture—the values that underpin behaviors, influence problem-solving capability, and facilitate truly revolutionary potential. Those values are open values. [Read More]

The British government wants to build backdoors into standard encryption libraries. This means the technology that protects your financial transactions could have a backdoor. These same backdoors were just exploited in the WannaCry outbreak that just took down the NHS. Who created that backdoor? The NSA, whose incompetence allowed this “tool” to fall into the hands of a Russian government-affiliated hacking group. You don’t do anything illegal? Great! You do have a bank account, right? [Read More]

I have accepted the position as Manager, Infrastructure & Operations at Bankrate in Detroit. Julie, Max, Sunny, and I will begin moving to Michigan in mid-June! I will be leading DevOps efforts as the Bankrate team transitions software stacks and moves from on-premise data centers to the cloud. I am beyond excited about the position and the work I will be doing. Making the decision to leave North Carolina did not come easily. [Read More]

On Tuesday, May 23, 2017, I did a DevOps talk at Open Source South Carolina. The talk was a DevOps 101-styled deep dive into DevOps. Since the number one question I get when talking about DevOps, in general, is “where do I start?” I added my “The Three Things” to the already well known “Three Ways”. This provided both the holistic view while guiding people needed an extra nudge down the DevOps path. [Read More]

The other day my Vice President asked me a question, “What would it take to turn a good SysAdmin into a DevOps engineer?” He followed it up with, “Don’t spend more than ten minutes thinking about it.” He was not disappointed when I told him the next day I am spending way more than ten minutes on answering the question. This is a hard question for me to answer. This is a question that you won’t know if your answer is right for at least six months. [Read More]