Posts
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Resources and support that have helped me on my Staff+ Engineer journey
When I first encountered the term “Staff Engineer” about 5 years ago, I was struck by how little guidance, direction and documentation were available about the role and its expectations. However, eventually I found Will Larson’s website and his insightful interviews with various senior technical folks in the industry. Eventually he published his book “Staff Engineer: Leadership beyond the management track” in 2021. Then I came across Tanya Reilly and her blog post entitled “Being Glue” and felt like someone was finally helping me put words to the things I cared about professionally.
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Valuable asynchronous work principles
The Covid-19 pandemic showed the world that it was possible to be productive in a remote work setting. Some folks have taken things further by fully embracing asynchronous work, some even did this way before 2020.
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Autoscaling Concourse workers with custom Prometheus metrics
If you’re operating a Concourse cluster on Kubernetes, you may or may not need to implement the autoscaling of Concourse workers to automatically handle expanding and contracting workloads. The Concourse helm chart supports using Kubernetes’ Horizontal Pod Autoscaler to enable autoscaling based on observed CPU utilization or custom metrics.
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Learnings from operating Concourse for the past year
I have had to operate a Concourse cluster on GKE for the last year or so. There have been so many things that I wish I knew back when I started that I have learned over the last few months. So, this is mostly a reminder to my future self in the event that the information is helpful, but maybe this will also help someone else who is going through a similar journey.
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Wrangling Kubernetes configuration (Part 2)
Following up on my first post, where we looked at a simple example of using a Jsonnet template to determine what kind of icon path to use for a
Chart.yamlfile, I’d like to take a look at a less simple, but possibly still contrived, example of utilizing Jsonnet to dynamically reconstruct YAML. -
Wrangling Kubernetes configuration (Part 1)
I’ve recently been working a lot with helm charts and Kubernetes configuration and one of the challenges has been managing the differences between all the installation methods and ensuring it is deployable on multiple Kubernetes platforms e.g. helm chart on Helm Hub, helm chart on the Rancher Library Catalog, single YAML file format for both Kubernetes and OpenShift, a Google Cloud Platform Marketplace application just to name a few.
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Beyond Just Feature Development
Software engineering isn’t just about pushing out features, IMHO. There is so much that needs to happen between the beginning of a feature and when it is actually available to be used by customers. I find that some engineers tend to glaze over these things with the excuse that it is not their job to ensure the software they write gets into their customers hands and works as intended. I disagree. Here are some of the questions I
worry aboutask myself when writing software. -
Pull Requests And Why They Don't Bring Out The Best In Us
The pull request (PR) system has existed on GitHub (and other similar products) from day one, and has been revamped a few times to allow for more options of collaboration around (all types of) code. As evidenced by this GitHub blog post from 2010.
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Attending Lead Developer Austin 2018
My thoughts and learnings from attending the conference -
Service outages and good practices around handling them
My learnings on what to do when there's a service outage -
Back up and blogging!
After a multiple year hiatus, I've resurrected my blog and hope to be blogging again.
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