"This Demo Could Have Been Better"
2024
2022
Preventative Myopathy
TL;DR What I do to maintain professional vs. personal live balance
OpenTelemetry Community Day Austin 2022
Preface: this blog post is just my travel log, personal reflections, and thoughts from my time conversing with other community members at OpenTelemetry Comm...
Telemetry to Transform Testing
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Why Run Tests Inside a Kubernetes Cluster
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3Vs to Transform Testing - Verification, Validation, Volition
NOTE: This is a placeholder article to house slides, comments, and notes related to my presentation for TSQA 2022 Wild, Wild Test on 2021-03-09.
2021
Defining ‘Developer’
It may sound like an unnecessary errand in 2021 to have to define what “developer” (“programmer”) means, but once again I find myself in the complimentary an...
Accounting for Privilege
After a few years of volunteer organizing DevOpsDays Boston and other local tech events, I found that there were some things I wanted to work out personally...
5 Trends Shaping the Future of Performance Engineering
As part of my usual duties, Tricentis asked me to name a few key themes and trends that I’ve seen during customer engineering work with forward-thinking cus...
2020
Personal Log 2020-09-02
Started later than I'd like, trying to spend more good morning time with the kiddos. Nothing huge on the schedule, some customer and internal meetings, some...
More Like Water, Less Like Waterfall
It's been too long a time since I published something here. The more time I commit to professional and volunteer and personal projects, the less time time I...
In Search of Behavioral Indications
Recent changes in an organizing group I'm involved in have given rise to questions in my mind about how well we're doing, not just in terms of outputs, but ...
2019
Thoughts on DevOps vs. Enterprise Culture Clash
Probably not unlike you, every day I work with folks caught in a clash between organizational processes and technology imperatives. "We have to get this new...
Put That in Your Pipeline and Smoke Test It!
I rarely bother to open my mouth as a speaker and step into a spotlight anymore. I've been mostly focused on observing, listening, and organizing tech commu...
Afterthoughts on Hive Minding
It's a powerful thing to understand how your brain works, what motivates you, and what you don't care about. There are so many things that can distract, but...
Crossing Cross-functional Chasms
Initialization Phase My first evening in La Ciotat: I picked up a rental car in town due to the good graces of Giulia, the front desk assistant who was co...
On Volunteering for Tech Community Work
This is my attempt to distill what I've learned over the past two years of contributing to maintaining and improving the local DevOps community in Boston. A...
This is Why #DevOps
Since well before 2008, DevOps as a keyword has been growing steadily in mindshare. This post is my version of a landing page for conversations I have with ...
On Lack of Transparency in SaaS Providers
As many organizations transition their technical systems to SaaS offerings they don't own or operate, I find it surprising that when a company acquires a 3r...
Performance Engineer vs. Tester
A performance engineer's job is to get things to work really, really well. Some might say that the difference between being a performance tester and a per...
Three, Sixty, Five
In less than three days, I recently passed through five airports using six planes to meet with three very important teams. Not a single Uber (because fuck U...
DDoS Prevention and MFA Hardening Before Release
Thanks for coming to my session at DevOps Days Pittsburgh! This page will be a placeholder for slides/video after the presentation. Resources: Link t...
2018
Holiday IoT and the Performance Imperative
A few words to manufacturers and vendors of tech toys: to really be ready for the holiday, if your product requires software updates in order to work or is ...
Value Chain in DevOps
Foreward: Since I highly doubt the following concepts will see the light of day in the final draft of IEEE 2675, I wanted to document that in fact I pushed ...
Wanting vs. Having for My 7yr Old
I make a lot of mistakes. I try not to do it on Github where commits are a permanent record of your competencies. So are children, only the impact of a word...
AllDayDevOps 2018: Progressive Testing to Meet the Performance Imperative
Mostly as an appendix for references and readings, but whenever I can I like to have a self-hosted post to link everything back to about a particular present...
Adhocathon: Selenium Conf Chicago 2018 - Rstats in Grid
The goal of this time-boxed, scoped hackathon is to visualize the health and activities of a Selenium Grid instance by contributing the code necessary to rep...
Engineering Is About More Than Code
Curiosity is what drives engineers, and is equal parts curse and companion. An engineer isn't limited to development or operations. An engineer would be a pr...
Subverting Social Bad Behavior with Community Service
Summary: personal aha...spend equal time on your community as you do on social media, and everyone will be better for it. The Local Buffoonery of Garden Vari...
How to “Hire” into a “DevOps” Market
Let's be clear. I'm mostly writing this so that I don't have to have another bullshit conversation with a high-level agency "technical" recruiter that doesn'...
Open Spaces at Swiftfest Boston
I'll be hosting an open spaces "in the wild" session at Banyan Bar from 6pm-9pm at the end of Swiftfest Boston Tuesday June 19th 2018. Look for me and for pe...
Socratic Method for Advocacy
In disassembly of how I approach a zero-knowledge situation, a few key dynamics emerge. The goal of this simple framework is to accelerate the bond-forming p...
What a Site Reliability Engineer Really Does…in DevOps
We really, really build ourselves into a corner with the internet and mobile and cloud and Agile "at scale". Good news is, we're engineers that can invent ou...
FUEL for Your Brain: On Focus, Usefulness, Execution, Learning
I hate acronyms. My dad used to use them far too much, the kind of guy that was more smart in retrospect than the kind of boy I was understood at the time. K...
Technical Recruitment 101 - Advocates vs. Evangelists
What's the difference between a technical evangelist and an advocate? What are these terms even? If you're a technical recruiter, I encourage you to know the...
The NRA, Magazines, and Video Games
I think we forget that we have trained a generation of children to commit mass shootings. "Video Trainings" like Call of Duty and Battlefield should be decla...
DevOps Testing Strategy for Dummies
Testing in a DevOps culture is very different from traditional QA scenarios. I talk to all kinds of teams, from Fortune 100 to startups, all on the journey t...
Setting Up Your Own Selenium Grid on AWS
This article describes how DevOps teams can quickly spin up a reliable, cost-effective Selenium grid for automated testing in minutes. What Is Selenium &...
2017
Recap of DevOps Days Boston 2017 with David Fredricks
This week, I had the opportunity to continue a conversation started weeks ago with David Fredricks, organizer of DevOps Days Boston. You can watch it on YouT...
Folding Open Source into Enterprise DevOps
Open source software (OSS) is a foundational part of the modern software delivery lifecycle. Enterprise teams with DevOps aspirations face unique challenges ...
Recap of DevOps Days Boston 2017 with Corey Quinn
This weekend, I had the chance to have a 'distributed beer' with Corey Quinn of Last Week in AWS to chat about the DevOps Days Boston 2017 conference last we...
Beyond DevOps: The ‘Next’ Management Theory
In a conversation today with Ken Mugrage (organizer of DevOps Days Seattle), the scope of the term 'DevOps' came up enough to purposely double-click into it....
How to Be a Good DevOps Vendor
This article is intended for everyone involved in buying or selling tech, not just tooling vendors. The goal is to paint a picture of what an efficient suppl...
Stop Using the ‘Staging’ Server - DevOps Days Boston
Chloe Condon presented on how containers and IaC (infrastructure as code) can help us skip over the 'staging server' part of traditional deployment strategie...
Iterative Security - DevOps Days Boston 2017
Tom McLaughlin presented on iterative security, incorporating security into DevOps cycles through early detection and prevention of vulnerabilities. His sli...
Enterprise Wild West - DevOps Days Boston 2017
Rob Cummings' keynote at DevOps Days Boston 2017 explored how Simon Wardley’s Pioneers, Settlers, and Town Planners model applies in enterprise engineering a...
No Root Cause in Emergent Behavior - DevOps Days Boston 2017
At DevOpsDays Boston 2017, Matthew Boeckman presented on how emergent behavior in complex systems requires us to re-think our root cause analysis paradigms. ...
DevOps is Organizational, Operational, and Orthogonal
Some people seem to think that DevOps is a buzzword. It is not. At all. As part of my research for integrating concepts of risk, quality assurance, and con...
Streaming Tweets to InfluxDB in Node.js
This week, I've been exploring the InfluxData tech stack. As a muse, I decided to move some of my social media sharing patterns formal algorithms. I also wan...
Wrangling Promises in Node.js: 3 Misconceptions Resolved
ES6 (i.e. proper Javascript) isn't the first time Promises were introduced, but formally supports them now. Believe me, you want to start using Promises in y...
Performance Is (Still) a Feature, Not a Test!
Since I presented the following perspective at APIStrat Chicago 2014, I've had many opportunities to clarify and deepen it within the context of Agile and De...
Being a Great Technical Evangelist Means Being in the Right Room
Question: Are you 'in the right room'? As a part-time practitioner and technical evangelist, one of the most important questions I can ask myself is just tha...
A Jenkins Pipeline for Mobile UI Testing with Appium and Docker
In theory, a completely Docker-ized version of an Appium mobile UI test stack sounds great. In practice, however, it's not that simple. This article explains...
Using Appium to Test Fingerprint Authentication on Android Devices
In this article, I'll show how you can use Appium to automate fingerprint authentication on Android mobile devices. The general process also applies to iOS, ...
Automating the Quality of Your Digital Front Door
Mobile is the front door to your business for most / all of your users. But how often do you use your front door, a few times a day? How often do your users ...
The Four Quality Katas of a Code Craftsman
I recently had the opportunity at a conference to ramen up with Lance Gleason of Polyglot. Of the many things we discussed in 3hrs, it came down to this: "A ...
Don’t Panic! (or how to prepare for IoT with a mature testing strategy)
Thanks everyone for coming to my talk today! Slides and more links are below. As all my presentations are, this is meant to extend a dialog to you, so please...
Android Debug Features and Tools chat with Sam Edwards
Developing Android apps can be hard...without the right tools and patterns in your back pocket. I had a chance to sit with Sam Edwards (@handstandsam) to tal...
Fast Feedback at Developer Week 2017
I spoke about the importance of fast feedback across the software delivery pipeline at Developer Week 2017 on Tuesday. Below is the first 30m of the talk plu...
Diving into React Native on Cloud Devices
I've heard that React Native is really cool. I've heard it can help to change your delivery, team, and hiring strategy. I've also heard it's toolchain is imm...
Beyond the Boston Women’s March for America
My brave, introverted wife marched yesterday in Boston while I took the kids to the park and cleaned up the house. It's the least we both could do. After a ...
Locale bugs & currency formatting in Android Studio
I grew up in the United States and like most countries I've traveled to, I'm used to seeing money that look like this: $56.33 €12,50 £281.71 A modern I...
Jenkins on Docker to build Android apps
For an reference example, I had to set up Jenkins to build my Android app. Though I'm using a Mac, once Docker is involved, I can also use the exact same ste...
Installing Android SDK in Docker
For a recent project, I had to include the Android SDK build tools as part of a Jenkins Dockerfile. No problem. Download and execute installer, right? Wrong....
2016
AnDevCon: Espresso Is Awesome, But Where Are It’s Edges?
For my presentation at AnDevCon SF 2016, I focused on how Espresso represents a fundamental change in how approach the process of shipping software that prov...
Schrödinger’s Box and other complexities of scaling the software delivery lifecycle
Google Slides Thank you to everyone at Defrag for attending my session. Great conversations afterwards, and looking forward to any more input you have in the...
How can a PID Controller Help to Fight EULA Apathy?
Value comes from what you do. As part of a working class, I firmly believe that when someone takes away your control over the work you do, they violate a bas...
Intercepting Espresso Intents, a Security Concern?
Just came across this nugget after Googling for 30 seconds. https://github.com/intrications/intent-intercept Essentially, you can mine an app for the intents...
Looking forward to Codestock 2017
As we were preparing for a webinar yesterday, a co-worker, @nicksanjines, mentioned a TN local developer event: Codestock Side note: Nick has a great set of ...
Android Studio: How to find the Package Name from APK
If you've been given an APK file but don't know the ApplicationId/Package name, you can use the 'aapt' (Android Asset Packaging Tool) to obtain this value. W...
Why Espresso: Unit vs. UI testing
This article differentiates unit tests, such as those written for jUnit, from UI tests in Espresso through both purpose and technical value. What is Espresso...
You Must Be This High to Ride the Continuous Bandwagon
There’s a lot of hype when it comes to continuous deployment (CD). The fact is that in large organizations, adopting CD takes changes to process, responsibil...
Dear Sauron, I will not be returning to Mordor
[originally written 4/22/2015] Just to be clear, I'm not talking about J.R. Tolkien. I have been to the Mountain. I have felt the Ashes on my brow. I have se...
Why responsive web developers must learn Selenium
Developers need fluency in technologies that the team uses for UI testing. Similarly, testing has become more a programmer's job than a point-n-click task. A...
What Can You Do Without an Office?
[caption id="attachment_366" align="alignright" width="150"] Meme == fun! Make one yourself! Tag #SummerOfSelenium[/caption] I rarely go to the beach. When I...
Gluecon 2016: Melody Meckfessel on Serverless Technology
I had the opportunity to attend Melody Meckfessel's presentation at Gluecon 2016 last week. As someone with years of experience at Google, when she speak, sm...
Kindness: What Makes a Great Technical Team
How do you quantify what makes a great working environment, a good team, and work worth doing? An important piece for me is kindness. Kindness is Human At th...
Minimum Viable Open Source
It was about 7 months ago I started to feel myself drawing a line about how I use the words "open source". 7 months. Certainly in my copy, my writing, and my...
The Cost of Not Changing Things Up
This week, I realized that for years, I've been looking at life changes in terms of cost. How much will it cost to move, how much will it cost if I quit, how...
Big Data, No Context, Big Problems
Just look at this graph...not a good trend, right? How do we know? Graph(Big Data) - Context == Big Problem Graphs are visualizations of data optimized for ...
7 Practical Tips for Inclusion
This chick I know, I interviewed her last week for my upcoming podcast debut. She's phenomenal in a way that makes me so proud, grateful and humbled all at t...
Developer Experience is the UX of Your API
For software developers, APIs are a really logical choice for delivering how something should work on multiple platforms, acting as a sort of a common "langu...
CTO vs. CIO: How many tech “corners” do you really need?
Have you ever thought about what "departments" really means? The word "department" starts with another word: "depart". Stop, think, continue reading. Technic...
DevOps, Burnout, and the Search for the Holy Grail
I'll be speaking at APIdays Melbourne about the technological equivalent of the holy grail, continuous deployment, and why maybe we should re-think certain d...
How do you test the Internet of Things?
If we think traditional software is hard, just wait until all the ugly details of the physical world start to pollute our perfect digital platforms. [embed]h...
Gloucester Fire, Housing, and Neighborhood Life
This morning, someone died in a fire in my neighborhood. My heart aches for them and theirs. There have been other fires, all of them terrible and sad too. T...
New Year’s Resolution: Don’t Forget the Little Things
Resolutions are stupid. Goals and a plan are much better IMO. My goal for 2016 is "don't forget the little things". For me, that means getting much better at...
2015
Amazon Echo and the Future of Digital Privacy
Like every warm-blooded patriot of the Capitalism State, I own an Amazon Prime account. I vote, I pay taxes, I eat burgers, and I love the Boston Red Sox. Th...
Unanticipated Editorial Control
I took down someone's blog post of an event I was at two weeks ago. All I did was to praise one of the panelists for the amount of mic-drop-esque quotations ...
[Talk] API Strategy: The Next Generation
I took the mic at APIStrat Austin 2015 last week. A few weeks back, Kin Lane (sup) emailed and asked if I could fill in a spot, talk about something that was...
When you are really invested, you worry
I watched a couple of guys help each other today. One of them wanted to test out a dory by paddling it around the harbor before selling it. The other didn't ...
Don’t Insult Technical Professionals
Some vendors look at analyst reports on API testing and all they see is dollar signs. Yes, API testing and virtualization has blown up over the past 5 years,...
Automating the Self: Social Media
I’m taking on the task of building an automation system for some of my online social engagement. Since I am not such a Very Important Person (yet :), the abs...
Quality Means Not Accepting Crap
Software. Hardware. Things. Opinions. Places. Excuses. Ideas. Anyone can produce a cheap "affordable" solution. But details matter. How many cheap plastic th...
HackCU : An Example of Student Leadership
In an unused downstairs side room of a hotel, I listened to students from the University of Colorado express their desire to change the world, and their conc...
Defrag 2015 == Legit
Defrag is legit. By "legit", I go with the urban dictionary definitions in that it is "real", "authentic", "truthful", generally a good thing. Who am I? Just...
Defrag 2015 Beforemath
It's interesting to see themes change year after year. At an event like Defrag or Gluecon, it's hard to ignore the voraciousness of curiosity. Tinkering. Of ...
Advocation for Open Source
Getting people to understand the true value of open source goes beyond just making easily digestible bullet points. I don't mean the hyper-commercialized ver...
Swagger => OADF: Insider View
I still don’t get it. After multiple clarifications with a friend about the recent donation of the what-once-was-only-Swagger API description format to the O...
Iteration, Maths, and Continuous Delivery
Recently I’ve been reading "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". I also love to stare at trees, and this morning while waiting for the train, somet...
Zen Thoughts on New SDLC Diagram
The other day I was working on updating my visuals to describe the systems delivery lifecycle (SDLC) for software. Three new depictions arose. Why does th...