Virtual Andy

After the recent press around Automattic and WP Engine I decided to go ahead and abandon the Wordpress ecosystem entirely. I haven’t been thrilled with Wordpress for a while and the controversy was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back. This post has some details about how I moved away from Wordpress.com. Challenge I have a very old website. It’s been indexed by search engines and linked to in all kinds of strange places....

GitOps is an idea that entire systems are declaratively specified in code, versioned in Git, and that repositories are a team’s source of truth. There’s some plumbing required that takes the specified code and reconciles the system to that specification. In my experience, GitOps can be taken way too far and end up becoming a hassle. This post discusses some drawbacks of GitOps that I’ve encountered. First: GitOps isn’t awful Before I get into GitOps drawbacks, let me be clear: GitOps-y approaches aren’t always bad....

It’s 2024 so there’s got to be a post about AI. My only perspective about AI is from a consumer’s standpoint. I don’t understand AI much aside from a few basic concepts I learned in a machine learning college course I took in 2019. Mundane Tasks I use both GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT to help me accomplish a some boring mundane tasks. These AI tools are Good Enough for something like reformatting/transforming a CSV to another data format, remembering command line switches, regular expressions, or date string formatting....

This site’s been running for 15 years. During that time, I’ve heard from work colleagues and internet strangers about how the site’s helped them solve specific problems and shown them how to learn new technologies. The majority of the site’s content covers virtualization, systems administration, and infrastructure. Nowadays, I’m spending less time in these areas. Virtualization and infrastructure are still incredibly interesting and definitely not solved problems, they’re just not where I’m hanging my hat these days....

Tidy First?. This book discusses a series of practices that improve codebases. If you have a codebase that is resistant to change, this book provides several specific techniques to improve the codebase. This is the first book in an upcoming series from Beck. What I liked: Several of the individual “tidying” techniques were ones I’ve used but now I have a better way to communicate them, and the value of tidying to others....

A Case Study in Community-Driven Software Adoption I came across this 2019 report while browsing Google’s SRE Podcast called Prodcast (that’s a fun name!). I still can’t force myself to listen to podcasts. The report is a solid read. I enjoyed the discussion of social differences between traditional product engineering teams (referred to as DEV for some reason) infrastructure/SRE teams. It quotes a specific DEV/SRE postmortem: There is very little notion, in this SRE team especially, of an IC [Individual Contributor] being given a task without also being given the decision making for that task....

The Staff Engineer’s Path. This book discusses the “Staff+”engineering career paths, and gives concrete advice for folks in those roles. If you are established or new in a Staff+ role or struggling between choosing the Engineering/Management pendulum, this book is for you. What I liked: the entire book! Seriously. I enjoyed the Strategy/Vision section the most. The footnotes had great supplemental material. What I didn’t like: The concept of a drawing a map felt repetitive....

This post is about fixing a nagging issue with audio on a Vizio sound bar. The problem: during periods of silence in videos, the audio would cut out compeltely and turn back on with a significant delay. To illustrate: &feature=share This YouTube video has you guess the Disney theme. The theme you guess starts playing when a 15 second timer counts down. There’s a brief silence pause after each entry....

API by Design. This book is focused on REST APIs and introduces ways to measure complexity and some techniques to tame complexity. If you’ve ever worked on a REST API adversely impacted your WTFs/minute, this is a good book to consider. What I liked: introducing new ways to communicate complexity, like Reference Entanglement (APIs with excessive references or arbitrary counts of nested resources). I also liked the section that quantified complexity based on optional parameters....

Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations. I feel like Accelerate was an OK book. I picked this book up after seeing it recommended from Charity’s blog. I was hopeful for some mind blowing content, but it mostly provided confirmation of some truths I’ve encountered in industry a decade ago. What I liked: Research-backed conclusions about engineering methodologies. The book provides a reader some vocabulary, techniques, research, and links to business outcomes....