While tidying up for the weekend, I got pulled into an interesting twitversation with John Allspaw and Dmitriy Samovskiy on the topic of risk. Allspaw had linked to Johan Bergström‘s article titled “What is the risk That Amazon Will Go Down (Again)?” It’s an interesting read for those in the [web]ops space. But don’t let Read More
It’s that time of year again where students button up all their final projects (hopefully!) and march across stages all over the world to be awarded a degree they’ve been striving for years toward. Congratulations to all those donning caps and gowns right now, and welcome to the quote-unquote “real world!” A little known fact: Read More
(Editor’s note: I don’t mean to be banging the drum on Git this week, but Mike Fiedler and I were talking about this yesterday, and I’ve been meaning to write this for awhile, so…) I apparently have a bit of a reputation for being a “Git hater.” While I understand where it comes from, the Read More
The Ship Show‘s current episode tackles a topic near and dear to my heart: Git and, for our purposes, its (non-open source project) usages. The seed for this episode’s topic came up when the podcast crew was discussing whether or not release engineers, and by extension ops/tools/automation engineers, should have intricate knowledge of the version Read More
In response to my post earlier this week on Tinderbox’s end-of-life, reader Carsten Mattner asked: Reading [your post], I couldn’t figure out what replaced Tinderbox for the Mozilla builds. What feeds tbpl? Does Mozilla not use Tinderbox to build continuously? When I left Mozilla in 2007, there was a Release Engineering project in progress to Read More
This year was my first year attending ChefConf. For episode 19 of The Ship Show, we did a joint podcast with the Food Fight Show Crew, and had a ton of fun; if you’re looking for a high level review of the conference, that’s a good place to get a high level overview1. Even though Read More
About a month ago, I noticed a tweet from Coop: Pouring out a little liquor for tinderbox today. Drinking the rest, because, you know, tinderbox. It linked to a mozilla.dev.planning post describing the plan to end-of-life Tinderbox1. As one of a handful of people who was required in an employment-capacity to support Tinderbox in production2,3, Read More
Today marks a somber event, which I started recording in a series of posts in my blog-of-the-time, ten years ago today. What follows is an excerpt from the first one: A family friend picked me up and we started the trek back towards Fort Collins. We heard one last update as we sped off from Read More
In some ways, tech is a much smaller and more incestuous scene than I ever imagined – and I grew up in the midwest. There are also people in it who are dishonest, manipulative, abusive, bullying, mean-spirited, harassing and destructive. Early in my career I was very paranoid about maintaining amicable relationships with these individuals Read More
Longtime readers of The Sober Build Engineer may find today’s XKCD amusing1. I get asked a lot of times why this blog tends to rely heavily on footnotes; it turns out it’s mostly a historical footnote2. The original incarnation of this blog started back when I was one of Mozilla Corporation’s two3 full-time release engineers. Read More