From Grumpy's Garage

Image: public domain I spent a recent weekend engrossed in a CTI Co-Active ®  Coaching workshop. Among the coaching skills we practiced were reframing and geography. Both of those skills focus on looking at an issue or problem from another perspective. Sometimes we called it "viewing through a different lens." I've been looking through various lenses ever since. As I awoke this morning, I was thinking about my Hacking Holacracy project from a different perspective. I "zoomed out" to try to capture the larger view of what Holacracy looks like; not a view of what an organization practicing Holacracy looks like, but rather a view of the interpersonal dynamics that a successful Holacracy implementation calls for. I was trying to look at Holacracy through the lens of Project Aristotle. That's when it struck me. Successful Holacracy implementations (or any major change in an organization) aren't just about the structure and the processes. A successful implemen...

It's been a busy and remarkably productive month. I spent the first two weeks sprinting to the finish line preparing to deliver a tutorial, Playing in the Clouds , at the Cascadia IT Conference . That went well. Then I had to attend to a few items that I had ignored for those two weeks: steering toward the next milestone of a WordPress site I am helping to build preparing to lead a troubleshooting/brainstorming workshop,  WordPress Round Table , for WordPress site owners writing profiles of Makers (creative folks making cool things in their spare time) that use Google's Makerspace in Seattle. The last two items had deadlines yesterday, and came off without a hitch. The first item is on schedule for its progress status and planning meeting next week. Oh, yeah. Then there is my day job: tech support for Google Cloud Platform . That is going pretty well, too. But today, I'm taking a break. I slept in until 6am, and it felt luxurious. I spent a full hour at the gym instea...

It's getting down to the wire. Next week, Friday, March 13, I'll be leading a workshop (a "tutorial", they call it) at the Cascadia IT Conference to introduce system administrators to some elements of cloud computing. I expect that there will be several in the workshop who have experimented with virtual machines on AWS or Google Cloud Platform. My workshop will take that experimentation to the next level: making a website scalable. I call it the "Good Morning, America" scenario. It's 4:30 AM, Pacific Time. You are peacefully entering another cycle of REM sleep. You can sleep peacefully because your web servers are monitored. And the monitoring software with page you at any hour if the site goes down. Then it happens. George or Amy start chatting about the cool downloads on your company's site that are available only to registered users. But registration is free. At the commercial break, 7:37 AM, New York Time, 217,243 people try to register at your ...

If a bunch of  networks are going to be connected , they have to agree on how to talk to one another. They agree on a common set of network "protocols" to exchange email, transfer files, even to emulate telephones. A protocol is just a standardized way to talk. When your phone rings, you pick it up and say, "Hello?" I might respond with "Hi, this Brian. Is now a good time to talk about next week's meeting?" And the conversation continues. When it's over, polite "telephone protocol" requires that we each say, "good bye", then hang up and close the connection. Sending letters in the mail uses a couple of protocols. You remember writing letters, don't you? You get out a piece of paper and write the date at the top of the page, then, if it's an official letter, you add your return address, the name and address of the recipient, and a polite salutation. "Dear Mr. Smith, I'm writing to tell you how pleased I am that y...

Image credit: Google Gemini Failure Is Not an Option; It’s Required To be presented at the Cascadia IT Conference , Seattle, WA, March 7-8, 2014  (55 minutes) Abstract Google SREs (system reliability engineers) spend almost 90% of their time handling or anticipating failure 1 . Managing failure is at the core of keeping Google services as reliable as they are. In this workshop, we will explore some of the principles Google employs to make services reliable and how you might use them in your work. Everything fails. With a little planning, you can fail well. Shorter Summary A workshop to explore some ways that Google SRE makes Google as reliable as it is, and how you can make your services more reliable, too, with a focus on failing well. More About Me Brian Haney has been a system administrator and SRE systems engineer for seven years. When not writing, speaking or teaching, he helps maintain some of Google’s internal storage infrastructure. Notes: 1: I posit this without comprehens...

"The Cloud" is an overloaded term. In tech-speak, "overloaded" means that people use the same term to mean different things. Computer geeks like to connect computers to each other and make them talk to each other in electronic ones and zeros, making a computer "network".  Some computers on the network might have special jobs, like listening for incoming email messages or accepting requests to download any new messages. A file server is a place to copy files to or from.  A web server is just a file server that listens for requests, usually from anywhere and in a certain protocol. Those files are in a particular format, like hypertext markup language (HTML), and often have references to other files also on the web server, like images and videos. You might have special devices on your network, like security cameras, web TVs, or wi-fi access radios. Somewhere, your network has a box that is also connected to the Internet, your Internet "router". A ro...