Last week, after spending weeks teetering back and forth about purchasing the Pit Barrel Junior Cooker/Smoker, I finally pulled the trigger on it. Over the course of the pandemic I have been poking and prodding some folks that are much more knowledgeable than me.…
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.…
Over the last 20+ years my personal blogging has been marred with fits and starts, but I've found Ghost to be an excellent option to self-host.…
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.…
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…
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…