Virtual Andy

Content I published today: Home Office AWS GCP Azure Incidents 2024 I joined Lambda Labs Happy Hacking!

In early 2024 I started a project called Cloud Insight Index which went through AWS, GCP, and Azure public incident postings and collects information about each incident in 2023. This post is the 2024 edition. See the project’s page for methodology and 2023’s numbers. Unfortunately, AWS/GCP’s incident postings do not go back to January 2023 and I don’t have last year’s dataset so I can’t do a year-over-year comparison across providers....

In November I started a new job as a Senior Software Engineer at Lambda Labs. I am working on Lambda’s Cloud offerings which means I’ll be spending a lot more time with virtualization, Linux, GPUs, HPC, and software defined networking. This is the first job I’ve had where I chose a Linux Laptop (Thinkpad X1 Carbon). My rationale: if the systems I’m deploying to all run on Linux, why not also build directly on Linux?...

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....