Tactical efficiency does not replace strategic efficacy

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....

September 29, 2019 · 3 min · Chris Short

Seth Vargo says hell no—puts Chef on ICE

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....

September 22, 2019 · 3 min · Chris Short

Your 39 bps matters more than you think

A slightly shorter version of this article was featured in DevOps’ish 144: Your 39 bps matters, happy little hybrid clouds, Kubernetes with a side of service mesh, HA SQLite, and more This week I read about a study of 17 languages that suggests humans, “no matter how fast or slowly languages are spoken, they tend to send information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second, about twice the speed of Morse code....

September 10, 2019 · 4 min · Chris Short

Joining forces with OpenShift

This Monday (2019-08-19) will be my first day as Principal Technical Marketing Manager on the Cloud Platforms team at Red Hat. What does that mean? OpenShift (a lot of OpenShift), Kubernetes, containers, Operators, and all the associated bits will be my day job. Helping folks help themselves with technology is still and always will be the name of my game. But, working full time in the Kubernetes or cloud native ecosystem was a 2020 goal....

August 18, 2019 · 5 min · Chris Short

Use The Force, Larry: Oracle Playing Politics with Nation's Defense

This article is based on the introduction to DevOps’ish on 2019-07-28. Some parts are duplicated but this is a much deeper dive than I could do in the newsletter (and these 1500 words barely do the topic justice). Also, yes, I work for Red Hat. No, these views do not represent theirs. Please take a moment to read my disclaimer. Above all things, I’m an American, and this issue trancends business....

July 29, 2019 · 8 min · Chris Short