Linux

Every open source project eventually hits a moment where someone has to make a call nobody agreed on in advance — and governance is the system that determines who has the authority to make it. This post walks through every major governance model in plain language, from BDFLs and do-ocracies to lazy consensus and multi-stakeholder consortia, including how mature projects like Kubernetes layer several models at once. MkDocs is included as a real-world example of what happens when governance gets skipped entirely.

I’m not going to lie. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a helpful technology. It’s supposed to have made getting a Linux environment on Windows easier. However, having just tried getting it up and running on the lone Windows box I own, I can confirm it’s a pain to install unless you’re a Windows system administrator or know what you’re doing. The hype for WSL2 appears to have overlooked the user experience. ...

This introduction to eBPF is adapted from the beginning of DevOps’ish 278 I occasionally ask for writing prompts from folks on Twitter for DevOps’ish. Sometimes asking on social media works well. Other times it’s giving someone a good URL and still scratching my head about what to write. But for DevOps’ish 278, the people have spoken. They want to learn more about eBPF. What is eBPF? eBPF (which is no longer an acronym for anything) is a revolutionary technology with origins in the Linux kernel that can run sandboxed programs in a privileged context such as the operating system kernel. It is used to safely and efficiently extend the capabilities of the kernel without requiring to change kernel source code or load kernel modules. ...

In November, I went down to Raleigh to meet my team for planning meetings and team building. For a few of my teammates, this is our first face to face interaction with each other ever. My boss wisely gave us a relatively simple assignment. Create a slide sharing what we’ve done this year and want to do next year (which I’ll share to an extent in a later post). Create another slide listing three things that make us who we are (born in a unique place, grew up on a farm, etc.) and three things we’re professionally known for. The assignment seemed simple enough, but it turned out to be way better than I thought it would be. It fostered a shared knowledge amongst the group about each other that I think others could benefit from using potentially. ...

tl;dr “It is with great pleasure that I announce I am joining the Ansible team at Red Hat as Principal Product Marketing Manager.” In The Beginning… In 1998, I was working at a dial-up ISP in Hickory, NC. We were heavily invested in Windows and needed to reduce costs and increase speed. My CEO at the time had the foresight to know that Linux was the future. She hired two engineers to transform the business into a Red Hat Linux based ISP. These engineers had the challenge of swapping platforms and teaching those of us that didn’t abandon ship Linux. My first Linux distro was Red Hat Linux 5 (not RHEL, Red Hat Linux). From that point on, I knew Red Hat was a platform to watch and utilize. ...