Fear and Loathing in YAML

This post was originally written as the introduction to DevOps’ish 188, has been modified based on feedback, and deemed worthy to share as its own blog post. Photo by Christina Morillo from Pexels We kinda went down a rabbit hole the other day when I suggested folks check out yq, “The aim of the project is to be the jq or sed of yaml files.” First, there’s nothing wrong with this project....

October 21, 2020 · 5 min · Chris Short

Open Source Initiative Board of Directors 2020

The 2020 election for the Open Source Initiative Board of Directors is rapidly approaching. Before going to IBM FastStart in Las Vegas last week, I nominated myself for a seat on the board as an Individual Member. I spoke with a few friends in the months prior to submitting my nomination. It sounds like OSI could use my help. “Open source software has done nothing but provide opportunity after opportunity in my life....

February 26, 2020 · 4 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

Upstream vs Downstream

I was working on things for work (as one does) when it dawned on me. Very few folks understand the difference between upstream and downstream as it relates to open source software. I used Red Hat projects as a pointer. Here is the output of that effort (which was scratching the surface). Upstream vs. Downstream Upstream vs. Downstream is confusing at times. But, for the bigger Red Hat projects this holds true:...

June 25, 2019 · 1 min · Chris Short

Microsoft Has Come a Long Way

Microsoft has come a very long way in its fight back into the graces of all technologists. There will be some die hards that will never forgive Microsoft for what it attempted to do to open source software. Like there will be some die hards that won’t embrace PowerShell, WSL, and future Microsoft improvements. But, there is no denying that Microsoft has changed as a company in a way that is beneficial to the open source community and beyond....

April 16, 2018 · 7 min · Chris Short