This May 1, I joined Upgrade Inc as a Principal DevOps Engineer on the Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) team. Technically this is a change of industries from automotive to financial. I was previously at Autonomic, a Ford subsidiary, as a Principal Site Reliability Engineer on the Observability team there. In practice, my clients continue to … Continue reading Joining Upgrade
Join or union ranges from multiple tabs in Google Sheets
A spreadsheet is the wrong tool for everything, but it's also a very available tool. No results came up when I was searching for how to join data sets in different ranges in a Google Sheets or Excel worksheet, so here's how you do it. Suppose you have these three data sets in a Google … Continue reading Join or union ranges from multiple tabs in Google Sheets
@here considered harmful
You should never, ever post an @here, @channel, or @everyone in Slack, or Discord, or Teams, or HipChat, or Mattermost. When you do this, you turn an asynchronous communication tool into a synchronous one. You interrupt everyone's day and night regardless of what time zone they are in. It is completely incompatible with working Remote, … Continue reading @here considered harmful
Git commands for a clean history
I recently saw a discussion about how very few people actually use the famous gitflow workflow. This makes sense to me. The situation where one might have multiple simultaneous supported releases is relatively rare in software as written, because most software is written with one customer or use case in mind and that use case … Continue reading Git commands for a clean history
Work From Home Under COVID-19
Autonomic sent us all to work from home for social distancing a week before the rest of the Silicon Valley companies did, and two weeks before my father's Toronto bank did. Good on them. I very much appreciate the precaution. It was a sharp transition, because it was hitherto an office-only environment. This was less … Continue reading Work From Home Under COVID-19
Joining Autonomic #TalentAtAutonomic
I'm very excited to be joining Autonomic this coming Monday. They do self-driving car data. I'm joining as Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help grow the infrastructure by several degrees of magnitude. I expect to be doing a lot of Kubernetes and learning Golang as I go. This draws to a close 14 years at … Continue reading Joining Autonomic #TalentAtAutonomic
Contributing to open source at IBM Skills Network in 2019
In 2019, my team embraced the philosophy that any library or package we create should be open sourced with a permissive license in a public source repo. This is not just the right thing to do -- it's also a more productive approach. It's the right thing to do because we get to collaborate effectively … Continue reading Contributing to open source at IBM Skills Network in 2019
ISOC is selling .org to a private equity firm
The Internet Society is selling the .org registry to Ethos Capital, a private equity firm. Such .org domains are typically used by non-profits, the open source community, and -- for ineffable reasons -- my blog. The function of a registry is to grant monopolies over specific domain names for a year. They can set a … Continue reading ISOC is selling .org to a private equity firm
Hiring Developer Interns for January 2020
My team is hiring a new cohort of paid developer interns in Toronto (Markham) for January 2020: Back End DeveloperFront End DeveloperCognitive Data Science Developer We have a great, friendly, supportive environment. Everyone on the team gets two big monitors and the peripherals to go with them. IBM Canada Lab has free snacks and good … Continue reading Hiring Developer Interns for January 2020
My team at IBM Skills Network
Some of the out-of-town team members visited in October. We wrapped up the workday at a local escape room here in Ontario. It was good to have everyone in the same room, or perhaps trapped in three separate rooms filled with puzzling situations, each room more inescapable than the last. At IBM Skills Network, we … Continue reading My team at IBM Skills Network
Leo on Tech 