Friend and colleague @bear recently wrote up a post1 discussing “magic tricks” developers have started using to store their deploy secrets in git. Apparently it involves putting data directly into git using “the plumbing,” and encrypting it somehow? The post doesn’t reference specific techniques; if readers have pointers to those, I’d love to read them. Read More
In case you missed it, Mozilla’s own Brandon Burton (aka @solarce) joined the panel for the most recent episode of The Ship Show1, to talk about his research into and experiences with building and rolling out an internal platform-as-a-service (PaaS). He had a lot of interesting stories and data about introducing PaaS infrastructure at Mozilla Read More
Just a quick note before your Friday happy hour get started: QuickRelease 0.14 has shipped. This release focuses on a request we’ve had from many people: more documentation and examples. 0.14 sports: Full epydoc-style documentation for QuickRelease (generated docs are available, so you don’t have to do it yourself) A example set of processes and Read More
Last week, Robert X. Cringely did a fascinating four-part series1,2,3,4 on IBM’s failing fortunes. It’s a great series of posts, and definitely worth your time, especially if you find you and your friends pondering the Old Guard’s tactical responses to current trends in our industry at cocktail parties5. Cringely references a quotation from an old Read More
Nathaniel Mott wrote an interesting piece on PandoDaily last week entitled Back-End Engineers Are the Unsung Heroes of the Tech Industry. He argues that “Designers and front-end developers get all the credit,” despite the fact that the rest of the engineers supporting that whiz-bang device consumers want also make important contributions and have serious impacts Read More
I’m still very much enjoying Robert Glass’ The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering1 I’m still making my way through it, but I wanted to call out a corollary to one of the facts he covers (which even he calls out as possibly controversial): An Australian colleague, Steve Jenkin, suggested to me his view of Read More
A friend sent me this yesterday: Passengers on a plane are waiting for the flight to leave. The aircraft entrance opens and two men walk up the aisle, dressed in pilot uniforms. Both are wearing dark glasses. One is using a seeing-eye dog, and the other is tapping his way up the aisle with a Read More
A few weeks ago, I tweeted about a great blog post on a technique for managing the massive amounts of email many of us navigate daily. I’d become frustrated with the state of my own inbox1 and had been on the prowl for a new method to manage the email torrent. Having used it for Read More
I recently read FastCompany’s interview with John Lilly. I knew John from my time at Mozilla1, so it was interesting to hear him talk about the developments after my tenure at the Corporation. One thing he said stood out to me: [W]hen I was at Mozilla the activity I did mostly was to tell the Read More