Observations of a Staff Engineer in platform (Linux & AWS; formerly Windows and NetWare in hardware). This started as an academic blog and just kept going. Currently private sector and genderqueer. Not an official blog by any stretch. Really.
Nikhil Suresh of Hermit-Tech posted a critique of AI and how it affects decision-making today, and he brings up some points I want to highlight. Other people are tackling the technical and supply-chain sides of AI adoption in the tech...
I've talked about this one to various managers over the years when the topic of work-scheduling humans comes up. There are two big frameworks for deciding who works which tickets: Throughput: Assign the person who will complete the task fastest...
This BlueSky thread from Cat Hicks is on the money. There actually has not been enough reflection in the tech community about DOGEall I see are "they're not engineers" "that's not what engineering is" I want a thick good really...
It is no secret I'm a long time now-former Windows system administrator. The first Windows I professionally administered was Windows NT, and I was with it up through Windows 2008 (and a touch of 2012). I ran into an observation...
On Fediverse, Paul Cantrell, CompSci professor at Macalester in St. Paul Minnesota, posted the following list: Here’s the lightning sketch of Paul’s Treatise Against Efficiency that I’ve never written:1. Efficiency is asymptotically inefficient: as costs approach zero, the cost of...
For the maybe three of you still there, the StackExchange sites have been experiencing a multi-month spam wave from a certain group of spammers who've built automation for our sites. SuperUser gets it harder than ServerFault, but we both get...
I wrote a weird little book. I'm still getting royalties, so thank you all for buying, but this book does not easily fit into 2025 concepts of "observability engineering," so I want to talk about my goals and how it...
A sentiment just crossed Fediverse recently, which is in the vein of "RSS was peak social media, change my mind". The original post was from https://hachyderm.io/@Daojoan@mastodon.social and is quoted below: RSS never tracked you.Email never throttled you.Blogs never begged for...
The Department of Government Efficiency, Musk's vehicle. made news by "discovering" the General Services Administration uses tapes, and plans to save $1M by switching to something else (disks, or cloud-based storage). Long time readers of this blog may remember I...
I've been in the tech industry for an uncomfortable amount of time, but I've been doing resilience planning the whole time. You know, when and how often to take backups, segueing into worrying about power diversity, things like that. My...
Thanks to Ben Cotton for sharing. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I covered a lot of that in 20 years of this nonsense from about a year ago. The quick version is I was charged with...
Back in November I posted about how to categorize your incidents using the pick-one list common across incident automation platforms. In that post I said: A few organizations go so far as to have a fully separate process for the...
"Columnar databases store data in columns, not rows," says the definition. I made a passing reference to the technology in Software Telemetry, but didn't spend any time on what they are and how they can help telemetry and observability. Over...
Honeycomb had a nice post where they describe dropping a priority list of incident severities in favor of an attribute list. Their list is still a pick-one list; but instead of using a 1-4 SEV scale, they're using a list...
One of the kernel maintainers made social waves by bad mouthing Rust and the project to rebuild the Linux kernel in Rust. The idea of rebuilding the kernel in "Rust: the memory-safe language" not "The C in CVE stands for...