2017-01-27

3 Things I learned - Week #4

Another week has gone by.

  1. Children have a totally different outlook on life. At a family meal this week we were talking about life insurance – why it is needed – and how that money can help the family that is left behind in a financial way.

    My 11 year daughter asked – what would we do with all of her money – if something would actually happen to her (heaven forbid). The numbers that the adults were talking about were in the 7 digit figures and the amount she was talking about was her life savings – somewhere around $500.

    I learned a very important lesson from this conversation. The amount she has was just as important and worth just as much to her  as the amounts we talking about.

    People cherish what they have – no matter how much it is worth – worth is only in the eyes of the beholder.

  2. Sometimes you just want to have a simple bloody if… then… else…
    Bashing my head against the wall for a number of hours finally brought me to this ternary. This is the closest I option I could find for my quest.
  3. IRC – Do you remember that thing from the 1990’s – Well it is alive and kicking – being used heavily – by a large number of Opensource communities. The Ansible community uses IRC as well – which is where I found out about the point above.

    My thanks go out to all those community members (regardless of the community they belong to) who are willing to answer the same silly questions from newbies – with such patience.

2017-01-20

3 Things I Learned - Week #3

This week has been a busy one. So here goes…
  1. Netflix is big.. Really big. Their monthly bill is 100’s of MB in size, it contains over 800 million lines of information. Netflix has a dedicated Hadoop cluster – whose only purpose is to load their bill (I find that hilarious!)

    Seriously though – this presentation from AWS re:Invent 2016 is a treasure trove of information – and well worth spending less than an hour on.



  2. Synchronizing two completely different git repos is not that difficult – but when they are hosted on two completely different providers (github.com and bitbucket.org) then it not simple.

    gitwatch helped me solve that issue.
  3. Writing an ‘artificial intelligence’ is not a simple task – and people don’t like interacting with robots – they prefer of course to interact with humans. I guess that my preference for interacting with a bot would be to not even know that it is a bot – it should be as human as possible – its name, its behavior and its responses.

    So giving your Bot a name might not be the best idea
Till Next Week!

2017-01-16

My Goals for 2017 - Q1

I was thinking of putting up a post about what I want to achieve in 2017 – but I think that I would really be kidding myself – trying to set expectations for the next 12 months.

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Making plans for the next 12 months are always great – it is good to have a vision of what you want to do in the long run, but as we all know, in our field things are so dynamic – and especially when working Agile – which is per sprint (between 2-3 week periods), making plans for the 12 months – is something that is not that realistic and will change over time.

The reasons for this vary – for me personally (and will probably change on a person-to-person basis) and include:

  • Technology changes
  • Business priority changes.
  • Role changes

So for me this was I want to accomplish in the next 3 months (and hopefully I will be able to hold myself accountable)

  • Ansible. I need to get more acquainted with Ansible – using it for day to day work as much as possible
  • AWS. Start using AWS as my default cloud platform for all my work in the cloud. This is dues to a work priority change (so expect a number of posts on AWS as well)
  • Kubernetes. Again a work priority call – but since the whole world is moving in the container direction, I would like to stay ahead of the curve.
  • Read at least one book. It will probably be technical in nature. I find it invaluable to actually take the time to disconnect and concentrate on doing some in depth reading on a specific subject – instead of just going over a blog article (or four) on a subject.
  • Blog regularly. Something that I have neglected this past year for a multitude of reasons. I will try and keep up my 3 Things I Learned series on a regular basis

I am mainly putting this up here – to keep myself honest.

2017-01-13

3 Things I Learned - Week #2

We are constantly learning, evolving and improving (well at least I hope we are).

Personally I learn new things each and every day, not all of them are technology related, but still – I am pleased to say that knowledge is really infinite and we should actually never stop.

I am going to try and post a short note with three (it will sometimes be hard) things that I learned about this week. They will not be lengthy topics – just a byte size sentence with a link or two on the subject.

Starting from today – I hope to make this a weekly occurrence.

  1. The Mandella Effect. Are we actually living in a parallel universe – some of these 20 Examples Of The Mandela Effect That'll Make You Believe You're In A Parallel Universe. The one that really blew me away was “No, I am your father”
    image
  2. How do you find the TTL on a specific DNS record? – Sometimes you really need to know how long you (or your customers) are going to have stare at the wrong content – until their clients perform a refresh.
  3. Even if you run for a seat on the OpenStack Individual Member Director Elections – you should not be spamming all of the community each and every day to remind them to vote for you.
    By the way – if you have not voted yet – then you should.

Till next week!!