Life: Purpose and Mission

Hamza Sheikh

2024-09-17 04:36

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

2023-11-16 06:46

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.

Long Live RHEL Clones

Hamza Sheikh

2023-08-12 05:13

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.

April 10, 2022

Hamza Sheikh

2023-03-21 03:59

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.

The Constitution is Knocking on the Door

Hamza Sheikh

2023-02-26 08:27

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.

My Time at VMware

Hamza Sheikh

2022-09-23 20:07

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

Hamza Sheikh

2022-05-13 03:40

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

2021-11-22 07:13 (updated 2021-11-26 19:19)

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

Hamza Sheikh

2020-12-30 03:28

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

2019-10-06 06:04

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.