How to really configure Mac SSH agent
We all have some legacy systems out there. That can mean lots of SSH sessions. Occassionally my sessions would hang. One day not only did I find an easy way to reproduce the issue, but I had enough …
Infrastructure evolution
25 years is a long time. It’s flown by. In that time we’ve gone from sysadmins managing dozens of computers to devops and SREs looking after 10-100,000 computers. Let’s take a quick …
Sprints considered harmful
Scrum sprints are a technique of software development. All the pieces of work form a “backlog”. The team plans and estimates how much work they’ll produce for the next …
Lessons from air crash investigations
What can we learn from aircraft investigations and how we can apply these to SRE? … Over Christmas I fell ill, dizzy, unable to concentrate on work or even complete personal projects. Instead I …
Close down
After more than 10 years I’ve finally closed down my company, Bitcube Ltd. It was a fun journey for a while and I’m very glad to have done it. What most surprised me was that I generally …
Terraforming
Terraform is probably the most widely used tool to look after resources. Which resources? There’s many, here we’ll look at two of the most popular: cloud resources (e.g. object stores such …
Navigating the maze
It comes as a surprise to my friends that, despite being interested in computers, I’m not a technology geek. I certainly have some useful gadgets around the house - chromecast, UEBoom. My first …
Onboarding
I remember my first day of my working life quite clearly. I’d just joined IBM Labs based in Hursley, UK. “Ah, Adrian” my manager said, “you’re one of the lucky ones - I …
What's in a name?
A startup often grows to a certain size and then decides that it’s time to bring some “DevOps” expertise on board. Often this is to help scale the company - increase the velocity and …
Mac finder preview quality
Apple’s Finder image preview cannot be trusted to show pictures accurately. I’ve been sorting out my photos from a trip to Peru where I was lucky enough to tick off a bucket list item …