2016

A former co-worker and now friend used to have a tagline, “Everyday is a school day.” I remind myself of this fact nearly every time I learn something new. 2016 brought a lot of new knowledge and skill sets into my ever-expanding arsenal of tools. Surprisingly, 2016 brought a mix of both soft skills and technical skills. Let’s review some of the things I picked up during this journey around the sun:...

I like to remind everyone this time of year that, unless they have people’s lives in their hands, you have to keep things in perspective. Chances are you’re in a terminal on a laptop on planet earth which is but one watery orb circling a star as it hurtles through the Milky Way which is but one of many galaxies moving across the universe. Try not to take things too seriously....

I had the opportunity to present What The Military Taught Me About DevOps at the Triangle DevOps Meetup last night. It was a fantastic group of people and I fielded a lot of great feedback after speaking. One person asked if I would be willing to share my slides. I informed him that they were already shared but I think the notes that accompany the slides are important to share too:...

There are so many cool things about DNS one drawing is not going to do it justice. Please let this drawing serve as an inspiration to learn more about DNS. DNS is awesome because it allows you to have a full blown CDN for next to nothing. All you have to do is create a CNAME that points to Amazon S3.

Update: As of 2019-12-10, it would appear that due to rate limits and other service changes, this process is now broken. I leave this here in memory of the over three years of exemplary service IFTTT has given me. Buffer is a great tool for scheduling and posting content to social media. But, it costs money to do any sort of real sharing. I prefer to share more content from others than I do my own....

Hypertext Transport Protocol v2 (HTTP/2) is here and is being implemented at an ever quickening pace. HTTP/2 is going to speed up the web and enable new capabilities. There is a lot that stays the same but there are some significant changes coming. In educating myself I decided to illustrate some of the changes in HTTP/2: The first thing to keep in mind is the primary reason for HTTP/2 even being a protocol is to improve performance (and not necessarily security)....

The Open Systems Interconnection model (OSI model) defines a concept where every function of a computing system resides at one of its seven levels. When people say, “Layer 3 routing” or “L7 load balancing” they are referring to the OSI Model. It is an incredibly handy tool for troubleshooting as it reminds you to check the system at each layer. The official documentation on the OSI Model can be found on the ISO site (yes, that’s confusing)....

It’s 2016 (almost 2017) why is the time off on your system clocks? It became apparent to me that there are some folks out there that do not realize their clocks are off for a reason. Julia Evans recently made a graphic about distributed systems that mentioned clock issues and it made me really sad. Photo Credit: Julia Evans We had a saying when I was in the Air Force, “Timing is everything....