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Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, my views and opinions are solely mine though. I spoke, sponsored (as did Red Hat, my employer, thank you), and worked from the front row of DevOpsDays Detroit 2019 this week. The event sold out for the first time this year. The venue has been the College for Creative Studies in downtown Detroit for the past four years. The venue is awesome, in my opinion, because it puts systems thinkers in a venue space on top of an arts school overflowing with creative ideas. There is art around every corner. Attendees share the elevators with students going up to the event space. It’s both humbling and inspiring. Detroit is a real-life Phoenix Project. Instead of an auto parts manufacturer, it’s the 23rd most populous city in the US (and is ironically, The Motor City). But, the school is putting its students’ ideas to use to rebuild Detroit. Detroit vs. Everybody. ...

Disclaimer: I work for Red Hat, my views and opinions are solely mine though. I had the pleasure of speaking at and attending DevOpsDays Raleigh 2019. First off, this event routinely out punches its weight class as far as quality. Don’t get me wrong the McKimmon Center on NC State’s campus has gotten very dated but, this five-year-old event keeps getting better. Note: If you are not familiar with DevOpsDays, please consider attending one near you in the next year. They are affordable and encourage networking better than most events I’ve been to. I spoke at my first DevOpsDays in Detroit in 2016. We lived in Raleigh, and I wanted to work for Red Hat. Now we live in Detroit near my wife’s family, and I work for Red Hat. Who says DevOps doesn’t make dreams come true? ...

Background: I started using Ansible in 2014 at a data center company. I implemented Ansible to deploy our customer portal, which contained hundreds of war files, load balancer changes, database schema changes, etc. I’ve used Ansible at every position since. I joined Red Hat as part of the Ansible team in June 2018. I moved over to the OpenShift team in June 2019. I’m a long time Ansible user, advocate, and fan. I work for Red Hat, these views and opinions are solely though. ...

I used to think of industry analysts as 100% worthless to the broader technology world. After meeting Chris Gardner from Forrester, some of the good folks from RedMonk, and working with Red Hat’s Analyst Relations team, I’ve warmed up to Analysts a little. They serve an important function that a lot of us forget: Tactical efficiency does not replace strategic efficacy We as technologists spend a lot of our time tackling the next problem put in front of us. These problems are tactical challenges that need to be addressed. We are in the habit of blocking and tackling. We often forget we are working as part of a team in a more extensive system. We are moving towards a grander strategic vision. Analysts serve as a data point in a much larger world around us. They’re, for lack of a better term, intelligence assets. ...

Just when you thought a toxic, old, white guy with lousy hygiene was going to dominate the news this week, in walks Seth Vargo. On Thursday, Seth Vargo, a former Chef employee, learned something he wasn’t comfortable with about code he’d written. Seth discovered Chef had an active contract with the US Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (yes, that one). Seth then did something rather extraordinary. He yanked his code (including chef-sugar) from GitHub and RubyGems. This resulted in many production systems going offline across the globe. We could see some metrics about impact in a lawsuit at some point. When DM’ing Seth early Friday AM he told me, “It’s almost certain that Chef is going to sue.” ...