sgarland.dev

Recently, I wrote about being wrong. Specifically germane to this post, I wrote: Being wrong means I probably had some gross misunderstanding of a system’s architecture or the operation of a program, and that means I have an opportunity to learn more about it, and hopefully to be able to guide my decisions. I was involved in an incident where I thought that some EC2 instances had reached disk saturation. This was primarily driven by three factors: referencing an outdated man page, tunnel vision, and missing the units on a graph....

I wrote previously about how some things should just work, should not need mucking about with, and how I shifted my NAS’ duties to TrueNAS Scale. I must now inform you that I was incorrect, and have shifted back to running it manually on Debian. I’m a creature of habit. I also like knowing how things work, how to fix them when they don’t, and how to improve them. While TrueNAS (Scale, anyway; I assume Core also) does begrudgingly allow you to ssh in, the MOTD is a warning banner that they guarantee nothing once you’ve touched it outwith their blessed API path....

I grew up playing with computers. Our first computer was a Packard Bell 286, and I fondly remember getting a book on BASIC and trying to make a game with it. Later, we got a Gateway 2000 486, and on at least two occasions, I broke it by editing autoexec.bat and config.sys. A few years later, we got a Gateway (at this time, they had rebranded) Pentium III 550 MHz, which was an absolutely screamer for its time....

I suspect that most people with jobs involving any kind of production (widgets, software, energy…) are familiar with the idea of a post-mortem. You may know it by another name; the Nuclear Navy calls it a critique. A friendlier term is retrospective, with the idea that it emphasizes that it’s important to note what went well in addition to discussing areas for improvement. If you’re in tech, this is extremely familiar....

WARNING: This has absolutely nothing to do with tech, short of a mention of GitHub. First, I need to give credit to something I never in a million years thought I would be crediting: Twitter. Specifically pre-Musk Twitter, but anyway. Second, and more importantly, a person: Jaana Dogan. I’m linking to her GitHub profile because a. she’s a Distinguished Engineer there b. it’s less weird. Not like she’s ever going to read this blog anyway, but it still seems more polite....