My Time at VMware
September 23, 2022, was my last day at VMware. I spent 1700+ days working in the End User Computing (EUC) Business Unit (BU) on the Horizon Cloud Service (HCS) DevOps team. I am sharing some memories.
Power of the Red Hat Ecosystem
After what seems like a lifetime I have had to dive back into the world of Linux distributions. Digital Ocean, my trusted service provider, decided to stop supporting FreeBSD (my response tweet).
I will write about my explorations of finding alternatives.
Disclaimer: I currently work for a coopetitor of Red Hat. These thoughts are my own and do not represent my employer.
The SRE Doctrine
Have you read the Site Reliability Engineering book? First read it then read this post.
One disclaimer is that I'm writing this doctrine from the perspective of working in a large enterprise that is on it's own SaaS transformation. The kind of work I'm doing is driving the perspective and conclusion. I won't claim this applies to all SREs but I hope it's useful to some.
Vision 2020
It has become a ritual to checkpoint my career every so often and try to figure out where to take it next. It has helped me identify what I want to do and then get all the proverbial ducks in a row. As 2019 nears its end it's time to reflect on my aspirations and what progress I made. Also, I need to plan for 2020.
Reflecting on Team of Teams
I read a thought provoking book by General Stanley McChrystal, called Team of Teams. I live tweeted quotes from the book as I read it (easily-accessible thread). I wanted to reflect on the lessons I learned, along with a lot of direct quotes, in this post.
Documentation is Not Enough
What's the last thing developers want to do when the sprint is about to end and they have some more code to write? Documentation. What if I told you that documentation, while absolutely required, is not enough?
Small Diffs
As you embark on a new project, be it to build something new or to make incremental changes to something existing, make differences between each set of changes really small. Make small diffs, in other words.
Mirfy - Make it Repeatable for Yourself
Mirfy* (pronounced like Murphy) - Make it Repeatable for Yourself - means we should make our workflows repeatable. If you have to run through a workflow a second time, it's time to invest in making it repeatable.
* For the record, I coined this term myself
Contemplating 2019
I spent the holidays in 2018 contemplating what my career in 2019 should look like. It has become a ritual to checkpoint my career every so often and try to figure out where to take it next. It has helped me identify what I want to do and then get all the proverbial ducks in a row.
What is Mity
Mity (pronounced like mighty) is an idea to develop a tool to invoke workflows that are orthogonal to each other but from the perspective of a team are all related to their functions and activities.