June 13, 2011

Hey folks,

I’m sitting in my cubicle surrounded by the usual clutter of tech books and half-empty coffee cups. The clock ticks over to June, and I find myself reflecting on what we’ve been through this year. It’s funny how quickly things can change. Let me take you back a bit.

First off, DevOps is really starting to take hold. We’re experimenting with continuous delivery at our startup, trying to get our development cycle into a faster rhythm. The idea of releasing code more frequently and reliably has been gaining traction in the industry. Chef and Puppet are duking it out as we try to find the best tool for managing our infrastructure. I must admit, there’s a lot to consider—Chef’s Ruby-centric approach is pretty neat, but Puppet’s declarative language seems easier to manage.

Speaking of management, Netflix’s Chaos Monkey has been making waves in the DevOps community. The idea of deliberately breaking systems to make sure they’re resilient and can recover is something we’ve started discussing around the water cooler. It’s not exactly a comfortable topic; there are some pretty heated debates about whether it’s ethical to intentionally create outages, but I think it’s necessary for us to understand our infrastructure better.

The tech world in June 2011 was a bit of a circus show. OpenStack had just launched and people were scrambling to figure out what it all meant. Heroku being acquired by Salesforce also felt like a shift in the clouds landscape, though we still weren’t sure how much that would change things for us.

But enough about trends—what did I actually do this month? Well, I spent a good chunk of time debugging some flaky services running on AWS. One particularly stubborn issue was causing our app to behave erratically, and after hours of digging through logs, it turned out to be a simple configuration mistake that we had overlooked. Sometimes the solution is right there in front of you, but it takes a while to see it.

One funny moment came when I tried GitHub for Mac. It seemed like everyone was talking about it, but once I downloaded it, I felt like I was back in high school using AIM to chat with friends. The interface was clunky and the integration with our Git repos wasn’t as seamless as I had hoped. Still, it’s a nice tool if you’re looking for an alternative.

But let’s be honest—there were some more serious discussions going on too. One of my colleagues brought up an article about the “Enough Is Enough” campaign, which was gaining traction against SOPA and PIPA. It made me think about how much power we have as developers to shape our world through technology. We can make tools that enhance lives or ones that restrict them.

Finally, I spent some time setting up a personal email service using Instapaper’s API. It’s interesting to see how these services are evolving and integrating with each other. My “email canary” is a simple script that sends me an alert if my primary inbox gets too busy or if something unexpected happens.

So there you have it, a snapshot of what I’ve been dealing with in June 2011. It’s both exciting and exhausting to be on the cutting edge, but it keeps things interesting.

Until next time, Brandon