Chris Short

Since Sunday afternoon, I’ve been in a whirlwind of meetings, discussions, and calls about IBM’s plan to acquire Red Hat for $34 billion. My mind has been racing but, after some consideration, I’ve decided to share my thoughts as a narrative timeline. Trust me when say that I have given this format considerable thought. It is likely the safest way (regulatory-wise) to deliver my thoughts on the topic. I would like to point out that I have updated my disclaimer and this site’s terms. [Read More]

I have mentioned this a few times in various talks, on social media, and in my newsletter; the importance of psychological safety in creating effective teams is often overlooked. Google did an enormous amount of research to determine, “the secrets of effective teams at Google.” Code-named Project Aristotle, Google wanted to nail down, once and for all, what factors contributed to team effectiveness. The number one contributor to team effectiveness at Google was surprising at the time; psychological safety. [Read More]

An edited version of this article was originally written for opensource.com: 5 military phrases for DevOps practitioners The U.S. military is known for quite a few things, including its excessive and fascinating use of acronyms, euphemisms, and colorful phrases to describe certain situations. But many of these terms are applicable to other areas of life, including many non-military jobs. These are a few phrases I think crossover between both DevOps and the armed forces. [Read More]

tl;dr “It is with great pleasure that I announce I am joining the Ansible team at Red Hat as Principal Product Marketing Manager.” In The Beginning… In 1998, I was working at a dial-up ISP in Hickory, NC. We were heavily invested in Windows and needed to reduce costs and increase speed. My CEO at the time had the foresight to know that Linux was the future. She hired two engineers to transform the business into a Red Hat Linux based ISP. [Read More]

I was in the DC metro area when I received an e-mail about the Baltimore Go Meetup happening on June 5th. Since I was nearby, I decided to go ahead and RSVP to the event. I mentioned this on Twitter and shortly thereafter Johnny Boursiquot wondered if I could speak. Of course I said yes. I was already doing a talk that morning at DevNationFederal. What’s another talk in the evening? [Read More]

Red Hat invited me to speak at DevNationFederal. The organizers requested I present my DevOps is Not War talk to technologists in the Washington DC area. This crowd is a group of folks that are at varying points in their DevOps journeys. Many folks from government agencies and systems integrators were present. I was able to sync up with one of my Airmen from my time at Pope Air Force Base. [Read More]