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Programming the act of sitting down at a computer and typing in commands to make it do things has been a big part of my life for a very long time. I don t mean long as in Avengers: Endgame was still in theaters. I mean long as in the Vietnam War had just [ ]
I hate things I have to do every five years. It s just long enough for me to forget everything I knew about whatever it is, and starting from scratch every time feels like scraping asphalt off my driveway with a spoon. I think a lot of humans are like this, and it s pretty much what [ ]
In June of 2016 I thought I was interviewing for a python gig at a small chat company. Instead Olark s engineering director noticed kubernetes on my resume and I ended up on a zoom with two engineers from the company s Engineering Operations team. They were building an SRE culture to drive improvements in reliability via [ ]
It s been a couple of years since I ve written on software or systems topics. No specific reason for that other than that I wrote a bunch back when kubernetes adoption was ramping up and I just got tired of the topic (even though there have been plenty of new things worth writing about!). Also pandemic, [ ]
Originally published at https://medium.com/@betz.mark/so-you-want-windows-to-show-24-hour-time-eeac41062b73 I spend a large part of every day shelled into cloud servers, viewing logs, checking alerts in slack channels, looking at pages on my phone, glancing at the kitchen clock as I walk by to get coffee, and otherwise behaving like a typical engineer. These activities have something in common:…
Originally published at https://medium.com/@betz.mark/the-day-a-chat-message-blew-up-prod-2c30941db07a I don’t often write “in the trenches” stories about production issues, although I enjoy reading them. One of my favorite sources for that kind of tale is rachelbythebay. I’ve been inspired by her writing in the past, and I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to write more posts like hers.…
Originally published at https://medium.com/@betz.mark/the-cost-of-tailing-logs-in-kubernetes-aca2bfc6fe43 Logging is one of those plumbing things that often gets attention only when it’s broken. That’s not necessarily a criticism. Nobody makes money off their own logs. Rather we use logs to gain insight into what our programs are doing… or have done, so we can keep the things we do [ ]
Originally published at https://medium.com/@betz.mark/behind-the-front-lines-of-the-pandemic-dedaef9fcffd I’m a software engineer and so I usually fill this space with software and systems engineering topics. It’s what I do and love, and I enjoy writing about it, but not today. Instead I’m going to talk about what my wife does, and loves doing, and how the times we are [ ]
Originally published at https://medium.com/@betz.mark/pulling-shared-docker-tags-is-bad-5aea48e079c6 Last night we migrated a key service to a new environment. Everything went smoothly and we concluded the maintenance window early, exchanged a round of congratulations and killed the zoom call. This morning I settled in at my desk and realized that this key service’s builds were breaking on master.…
Originally published at https://medium.com/@betz.mark/after-my-disk-crashed-e4f6d1c29d93. Reposted here with minor edits. A couple of years ago I lost all of what I would have considered, up to that point, my intellectual life, not to mention a lot of irreplaceable photos, in a hard drive failure. And while this post is not about the technical and behavioral missteps [ ]