2020 Learnings, 2021 Expectations

We’ve all had challenging years before. However, none were quite as challenging as in 2020. In the conclusion of last year’s post, I wrote, “I am hopeful that whatever economic upheaval we face as a society in 2020 is limited.” At that time, economic indicators were bubble-ish. However, a global pandemic was not something I had in the cards. No one did. A global pandemic, international protests against horrific injustices, and a US government damn near inept at helping with any of it. These events led to the largest voter turnout in this nation’s history. Hopefully, this will change our path and put the country back on track. ...

December 30, 2020 · Chris Short

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. I like it, I find the tool useful, and that’s that. But the great debate started over our lord and savior, YAML. Yeah, I know, XML vs. JSON vs. YAML vs. TOML vs. the next thing is a tired and old debate. ...

October 21, 2020 · Chris Short

Talking Operators with Rob Zehicle on L8ist Sh9y Podcast

Your browser does not support the audio element but you can download it as an MP3 (right-click, save as...). On May 2nd, I joined my friends over at L8ist Sh9y Podcast as Rob Zehicle was trying to wrap his mind around Kubernetes Operators via Operator Framework. I’ve created the transcript so folks can read it if they desire. Rob Zehicle: Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Latest Shiny. This is Rob Zehicle. I am driving, uh, without my cohost so we’ll probably take some more jigs and jags and I have to do my own timekeeping. Uh, so we’ll figure that out as we go. Uh, somebody here will help me keep it short. ...

June 15, 2020 · Chris Short

Things no one tells you when you start a newsletter

There were a lot of reasons I started writing a newsletter back in 2016. Having worked at a few organizations whose business was sending millions of emails a day, one thing is for sure: Mail is hard and not for the faint of heart. Using a service that handles mail delivery is step one, in my opinion. After that, I figured a newsletter is, “sending an email every week.” Anyone can do that, right? ...

March 24, 2020 · Chris Short

2019 Learnings, 2020 Expectations

A former co-worker and now friend has a tagline, “Every day is a school day.” I remind myself of this fact almost every time I learn something new. 2019 was the hardest year of my life. I’d like to share some things I picked up on this most recent journey around the sun we call 2019. I’ll make some predictions about 2020 in the process too. Kubernetes Last year, I said I thought Kubernetes would get easier. That didn’t happen. It’s not any easier to use Kubernetes. But, to be honest, I’m not sure if Kubernetes itself will ever get easier, it’ll be us getting more used to using it and building tools around it. I still think vendors need to focus on ease of use if they want to see their products getting adopted. But, the project in general, might not need to worry about ease of use. This seems like hair splitting, sure, but, it seems like Kubernetes did manage to penetrate every sector of tech in 2019. This is going to lend itself to a big ole ecosystem of people and orgs working on ease of use on behalf of the community. ...

January 1, 2020 · Chris Short