I do not normally write reviews for products and I sure as hell am not getting paid to write this review (although, Pit Barrel, I'll accept any goodies you want to send my way). The story of the Pit Barrel business is better than the product they produce: Noah Glanville served in the United States Navy, upon his return, he and his wife went through constant prototyping and tweaking to build the cooker/smoker that is sitting in my backyard right now. I personally haven't verified how much of that story is true, but they build a damn good product and I feel great supporting it.
A few months ago, in an effort to inject a little bit of calm and normalcy at the beginning of our work week, my leadership team adopted a Monday morning “coffee hour” on Zoom. We've always been a distributed team – primarily out of Kansas City, Birmingham and Washington D.C. – but it wasn't until the pandemic was well underway that we began this weekly ritual.
Over the last 20+ years my personal blogging has been marred with fits and starts. The services/platforms/tools that I have used to host my words are countless – I literally can't name them all – but I had thought that I found a platform in Mediumwith a balance of style, customization and best of all dead simple tooling. All of that changed about a year ago when, like many other Internet businesses, their model for revenue changed and I was constantly begged to pay money to read other people's thoughts.
As an engineer, I am always looking to leverage tools and processes to make my life more efficient. I have been managing people for a good part of my career, but when I made the leap to leading a larger organization most of the tips/tricks I have learned didn't necessarily scale. Your goal must be to optimize your time to solve problems where technology can accelerate the business and product.
At Bloomberg my team is tasked with supporting infrastructure for all of our consumer and subscription web properties. We have been using Chef to solve some of our problems around configuration management. Most of our recipes were built using Chef Solo and eventually deployed on our cloud infrastructure without a Chef Server. As we began to plan to deploy software services to the teams that we support we quickly began to realize that it would be nearly impossible to manage multiple node deployments without Chef Server.
In Washington, during the peak of Hurricane Sandy, my power went out. The wind outside was howling, the UPS that my MacBook was connected to began to scream, and my Comcast Internet was hosed. We were in the middle of manually failing over our application servers to our New Jersey datacenter, and now I had to continue on my T-mobile tethered cellphone.