Random musings by Michael Hart
On May 8, 1945, Canadian soldiers from Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry rolled through the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands, officially liberating the city from the German occupation. The Germans had surrendered three days earlier, and the Dutch citizens welcomed the Canadians with great rejoicing. Somewhere in the thick of the celebration was a [ ]
The layout of your source code repositories will affect your company’s org chart, and if you get the first wrong, your ability to deliver software will suffer. Conway’s Law states that your software architecture will naturally match your company’s org chart. I expand the law and believe that your source code repository structure will naturally [ ]
A few weeks ago a colleague described a software development team that maintained manual testing and deployment practices. Deployment was so complex that the original developers wore completing the difficult deployment as a badge of honor. The question was: how can that team move toward a Continuous Deployment model? I confess to a shudder of [ ]
The windows rattled, that one picture hanging on the wall tilted again, our conversation stopped. We did not notice. Growing up beside a busy Canadian National railway, trains were a part of life. The engineers blew their whistles as they approached the road crossing, and the roar of the diesel engines as they made their [ ]
The act of writing Code and writing Prose is the same. They both use the same mental processes, have language constructs and audiences, and require significant focus to be effective. I’ve written code and countless technical docs and articles for well over two decades, and lately started writing fiction. This article has been percolating in [ ]
A few years ago at Arctic Wolf I put together a talk titled “How to be on-call”, in response to the rapid growth of the organization and increasing number of on-call schedules. The talk turned out to be very popular and the recording became part of the onboarding process for new employees. While some of [ ]
The concept of blameless culture has been around for a long time in other industries, and while the history isn’t clear, you could argue that it became an “official” part of the tech industry with the publication of the definitive book Site Reliability Engineering in 2016. My summary of blameless culture is: when there is [ ]
It has been five years since my last update. Replacing those ribs was extremely time consuming, each one was a three hour commitment needing helpers, and life just gets in the way. But it s finally done, and my daughters will never willingly crawl under a boat again. On the right is a picture of the [ ]
After an extended break due to other priorities, I m back at slowly installing more ribs. On the right is the back section of the boat with seven new ribs in a row. It s exciting to see a small section that s completely held together with new ribs. We broke three ribs trying to get the last one [ ]
With my Dad s help, and that of his well equipped shop, we manufactured almost 60 ribs for the boat, close to 500 worth of ribs! I first ran the 1 planks through the bandsaw and ended up with (mostly) straight strips of 1 x 1/2 by 8 long ribs. One pass on each side through [ ]