Leo on Tech

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  • Migrations

    It’s been a year of migrations. I moved my email to Fastmail. I set up a NAS to avoid Dropbox lock-in. I moved my Mastodon fediverse account to CoSocial. And now I’ve moved WordPress hosts. There’s more I can do to be a more elbows-up Canadian and to embrace small tech. One step at a…

  • Joining Upgrade

    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…

  • 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…

  • @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,…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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 Developer Front End Developer Cognitive 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…