Hamza Sheikh

Production Systems and Submarines

Hamza Sheikh — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 22:44:29 GMT

I was watching K-19: The Widowmaker recently. It's one of the best military movies. Starring favorites Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson, K-19 provides interesting insights into the operations of a submarine, albiet one from 1961. It also got me thinking about production systems.

Life: Purpose and Mission

Hamza Sheikh — Tue, 17 Sep 2024 04:36:11 GMT

Muslims believe the purpose of life is to worship, glorify, and obey Allah. For that we use the word of Allah, the Quran, as our primary guide. Our secondary guide, which is a demonstration of living according to the Quran, is the seerah of Muhammad صلى الله عليه وآله وسلم.

Over some time now I have been trying to fulfill my purpose as a human. I am by no means perfect. Actually I am so fallible I despair for my akhirat. I have also been trying to determine what my mission in life is.

I thought long and hard about the difference between purpose and mission. It has not been easy but I think I found a good way to describe it.

A Proposal to Blend Infrastructure as Code

Hamza Sheikh — Thu, 16 Nov 2023 06:46:27 GMT

The world of infrastructure as code (IaC) is broadly divided into two areas of responsibility: provisioning and configuring. Terraform, OpenTofu, ARM templates, CloudFormation, etc. are used for provisioning duties. Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Salt Project, etc. are used for configuration.

This proposal focuses on Terraform (OpenTofu) and Ansible, with the idea to blend these into a single platform.

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Long Live RHEL Clones

Hamza Sheikh — Sat, 12 Aug 2023 05:13:11 GMT

Red Hat's decision to stop publishing RHEL source code to git.centos.org really rocked the community boat. Instead, they want the Enterprise Linux community to build downstream of CentOS Stream, which does not get 100% of the RHEL source code added to it. I have spent a lot of time reading opinions from all sides and then some. I have deliberated a lot. I have experimented with running various distributions to replace the RHEL 9 clones I'm running today.

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April 10, 2022

Hamza Sheikh — Tue, 21 Mar 2023 03:59:10 GMT

On the night of April 9, 2022, and early morning of April 10, a political -- nay, an existential -- upheaval took root in Pakistan that continues to this day. The "imported government" of many parties, brought together by the then-Chief of Army Staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, overthrew the elected government of then-Prime Minister Imran Khan. Since that fateful night, this imported government, believed to be backed by certain western powers, has wrought destruction on the very fabric of Pakistan.

This living page is an attempt to document the heroes that have emerged since and the victims of a fascist state led by two successive Army Chiefs and their puppet regime.

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The Constitution is Knocking on the Door

Hamza Sheikh — Sun, 26 Feb 2023 08:27:37 GMT

The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Pakistan said the words (or something to that effect) recently when taking suo moto notice of the President of Pakistan announcing the date of general elections for the provincial assemblies of Punjab and KP. Ideally, the Governors of these provinces should have announced the date within 48 hours of the dissolution of these assemblies by the respective provincial Chief Ministers. Since they abdicated this responsibility, the head of state, the President, stepped up.

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My Time at VMware

Hamza Sheikh — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 20:07:36 GMT

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.

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Power of the Red Hat Ecosystem

Hamza Sheikh — Fri, 13 May 2022 03:40:22 GMT

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

Hamza Sheikh — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 07:13:46 GMT

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.

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Vision 2020

Hamza Sheikh — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 03:28:18 GMT

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

Hamza Sheikh — Sun, 06 Oct 2019 06:04:38 GMT

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

Hamza Sheikh — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 02:22:46 GMT

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?

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Small Diffs

Hamza Sheikh — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 05:49:38 GMT

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.

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Mirfy - Make it Repeatable for Yourself

Hamza Sheikh — Thu, 28 Feb 2019 05:37:27 GMT

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

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Contemplating 2019

Hamza Sheikh — Fri, 11 Jan 2019 07:22:56 GMT

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.

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What is Mity

Hamza Sheikh — Sun, 30 Dec 2018 18:08:52 GMT

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.

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Recap of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018

Hamza Sheikh — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 21:41:31 GMT

I was fortunate to attend KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2018. Here are some thoughts as it concludes.

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My First Experience with Go

Hamza Sheikh — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 21:44:40 GMT

I have wanted to learn and use Go for a long time. I got a chance at work to start using it to solve some problems. It has been a great experience so far.

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Imran Khan, Prime Minister of Pakistan

Hamza Sheikh — Sat, 29 Sep 2018 21:30:27 GMT

On July 25, 2018, Pakistan held elections. This was the second successive democratic transfer of power ever, since the country was born in 1947. Pakistanis rejected the corrupt status quo parties and their leaders. Pakistanis chose to give a chance to a popular leader who is considered a new comer even after struggling for 22 years in politics. Pakistanis chose Imran Khan to be their next Prime Minister.

The Harms of Pakistan's Cricket Isolation

Hamza Sheikh — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 17:12:45 GMT

International cricket in Pakistan was deeply affected by global events and regional unrest. In fact, cricket in Pakistan has been isolated for more than a decade now. Pakistan's "home ground" has been places like UAE for a long time. There have been cricketers who never played international cricket at home. The harm caused by this isolation goes deeper than most of us realize.

Programming Languages Don't Die

Hamza Sheikh — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 04:58:17 GMT

We agree, we subscribe to the philosophy "languages never die". There are new languages added to the mix so things become more complex. It's part of the problem we're trying to solve and help dev #gofaster

This quote is from ActiveState on Twitter. It got me thinking especially because I am -- seemingly forever -- grappling with the idea of which programming language will help my career in the future.

Resumes and Interviews

Hamza Sheikh — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 06:24:13 GMT

I have been interviewing a lot of candidates for DevOps roles recently. I also interviewed as a candidate for a DevOps role with my upcoming employer. These experiences have taught me many new lessons as well as revived some forgotten ones.

Python is the New bash

Hamza Sheikh — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 05:03:00 GMT

bash (or at least Bourne shell sh) is ubiquitous in the Linux and BSD world. Replacing it with Python will not be easy, painless, or quick. But the plethora of base tools written in Python for Linux distributions testifies to the mindshare Python has gained. I don't expect the likes of FreeBSD, for example, to bring Python into base anytime soon. But we as users can certainly replace our code written in shell with Python.

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Tinkering with Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite

Hamza Sheikh — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 05:00:15 GMT

I have been tinkering with my home network for a while now. Over time I have settled on some requirements:

Low power usage
Almost zero noise
Three or more gigabit (or higher) network interfaces
Support for multiple operating systems (OS)
Optional but highly desired: supported by FreeBSD, OpenBSD, or NetBSD

Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite (ERL for short) is a small and lightweight device that fits all these requirements.

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How I "Adopted" Seagull

Hamza Sheikh — Wed, 15 Mar 2017 07:01:17 GMT

I don't work with Seagull anymore. I don't know how to develop in C++. I have absolutely no interest in maintaining this open source project. Yet when you Google seagull linux or seagull protocol my GitHub repo for the project shows up on the first page. How did I end up in this situation?

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