Hands holding burning money

Lessons in Frugality: Why Pay for Linktree?

I opened someone’s Twitter profile in April and saw a Linktree URL. I click it and start to poke around after signing up for an account. The changing gradient backgrounds amuse me. I appreciate the mobile-friendliness and the built-in analytics. I needed something like this to help me add newsletter subscribers, guide folks to my various projects, and all the other things Linktree does. I have a lot of sites and social profiles. Plus, Linktree is better than throwing my entire website at someone and saying, “You figure me out.” With a Zapier integration, this can lead to newsletter signups too?!?! “I kinda need this,” I think to myself. I plop down my $60 for a year of service and spend the next few weeks adding, tweaking, and tinkering. Then let it sit. ...

July 11, 2022 · Chris Short

code-server, Caddy, Tailscale, and Hugo = My ultimate dev environment

I think I’ve discovered my development environment equivalent to nirvana. code-server fronted by Caddy on a box with Tailscale installed. I maintain a lot of Hugo websites. Hugo has been my go-to content management system (CMS) since discovering it in 2017 (I got my first Hugo site at GopherCon 2017). I’ve lost count of the number of domains I own (a common nerd problem). But, I know I have a handful of websites I update regularly. For years I’ve used the Settings Sync extension in VScode to make things consistent across machines. But something was always missing (for example, shell integration, fonts, etc.). ...

July 2, 2022 · Chris Short

Conway's Law and GitOps

Pulled directly from the introduction of DevOps’ish 272 Conway’s Law and GitOps are two things that go hand in hand. I’d like that not to be the case, but in building and working with an upcoming demo of multi-cluster GitOps, I’m worried GitOps might not reach an escape velocity over Conway’s Law. Conway’s Law states, “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” This might seem natural but think about the different ways we communicate now. E-mail, text messages, phone calls, Slack, Discord, Twitter, etc. are all communication tools that serve various purposes. But, in GitOps, whether you design around a good developer experience (using git as the only interface) or design around a minimalistic amount of tooling (one secret management solution), that tooling has to fit within Conway’s Law usually. ...

June 20, 2022 · Chris Short
Lucas Käldström and Chris Short talking at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2022

Lucas Käldström and Chris Short Talk Kubernetes, Physics, and more

Lucas Käldström has a brilliant thesis out titled, “Encoding human-like operational knowledge using declarative Kubernetes operator patterns.” We sat down to talk about how, “Kubernetes operators form a novel programming model, allowing a shift from humans managing servers to servers managing servers, analogously to the Industrial Revolution.” I had a chance to speak with Lucas at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2022 in Valencia. This topic is pretty mind blowing. Lucas’ thesis is available via GitHub. ...

June 6, 2022 · Chris Short

Moving off Spotify

This past week, Spotify has made it very clear that they are a podcast service first and a music service second. Regardless of how you feel about Neil Young, his music, or him asking Spotify to remove his music if they’re going to keep Joe Rogan’s podcast going, Spotify put a flag in the sand. This isn’t my first rodeo moving off Spotify either. This added something extra: unification of years split between many music streaming services. ...

January 29, 2022 · Chris Short