Everything political makes me angry. This is a thoroughly recent affliction. It happens whether the democrats or republicans have the edge in the halls of power. There’s no leadership, no compromise, no effective governance, no conversation, no understanding that the only viable long term outcomes must be win-win. There is none of the work that we the people need done. Just entitled, wealthy and disconnected power-seekers pandering to their audience. Loyalty to party is more important than what is actually good for the country. Read more...

Every three months, I take some time to look back and see what I’ve done and where I’m going. It’s good to stop periodically and think about your work. Is it good work? Is it the right thing to do? Is it the best use of limited time and resources? That depends on what you are trying to accomplish. In this case, I’m thinking about this website, this blog. What’s it for? Read more...

Logging is the primary user interface for supporting and troubleshooting your system. It is critical that you get it right. I know this because I have gotten it wrong often enough. If you move to microservice architectures and containers, the criticality only increases because errors and anomalies are as distributed as your runtime. Here are some opinionated recommendations about how to not get it wrong. Do not create your own logging framework. Read more...

That’s one of the most important questions. The tandem questions of ‘who are you’ and ‘what do you want’ can guide your life. Once you can begin to answer them. The key word there is begin. They are not answered once. You will keep asking and answering them through a lifetime. For me and for now, it’s … Interesting friends and companions. An opportunity to learn, every day. A resilient, healthy, and loving family. Read more...

I’ve been working on converting some of our Java based applications to run in Docker containers in an AWS ECS cluster. With our existing pipelines for these applications, we store metadata from the build as properties on the build artifact in Artifactory. This includes information like the git revision associated with the build, the branch it was pulled from, etc etc. In our transition to Docker, we aren’t using Artifactory for image storage. Read more...