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I have been trying to fit a lot of square pegs into round holes lately. Eliminating technical debt with modern day DevOps practices to reduce costs is seldom fun or glamorous but is very often beneficial. Reducing costs should be the mindset of IT and one surefire way to do that is to spend the right amount of time on a task to complete it successfully. Finding that balance is definitely tricky especially when a lot of us are human time division multiplexers now. But, that right combination of good work and adequate time spent is definitely out there. ...

If you have not heard, Verizon announced they are going to acquire Yahoo. This ends a very long, drawn out bidding process in what has been the very long death of Yahoo. Yahoo, the brand, probably will not disappear in this deal (much like how AOL is still a brand after its acquisition by Verizon). AOL and Yahoo have benefitted greatly from their once high times. AOL’s story is well known (technological advances eroding their user base). But Yahoo’s downfall has taken significantly longer. The end of Yahoo was pretty much inevitable the day they said they could no longer compete with Google (back in the early 2000s). What can we learn from Yahoo’s downfall? ...

On July 15, 2016 the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) issued an External Intelligence Note regarding the recent smash hit augmented reality mobile game Pokémon GO. The Note’s classification was unclassified/for official use only with the intended audience being the law enforcement and security communities. The completely unclassified summary of the FBI External Intelligence Note states: The FBI’s Washington Field Office (WFO) assesses it is very likely a increased participation in the Pokémon GO augmented-reality smartphone application will result in an increase in law enforcement encounters and suspicious activity reports (SARs) in the National Capital Region (NCR) due to a high concentration of museums, art installations, historical markers, and monuments identified as target locations, or “PokéStops,” and players attempting to access restricted areas. ...

Taking ownership or “planting your flag” in an idea, work, or concept is often one of the best things someone can do. To sit in a room full of people and say, “This is mine. I will take care of it.” Makes everyone in the room know you are the point person committed to making it happen. The same holds true when discussing documentation, processes, and ideas for long-range planning. ...

A co-worker and I needed to remove all instances of a binary blob from one of our git repos a while back. This was a lot harder than I thought it should have been, in my opinion. However, distributed version control is not really designed to easily allow folks to delete every instance of a file. But, if you ever run into a case where you do need to expunge a file in git here is how we did it. This would work to remove a file from any cloud, service, or local git repository. ...