Because it’s all about principles, not practices.

Tools of a certain complexity or routine unfamiliarity are not run de novo, but are instead copy-pasted and tweaked from previous known-good examples.

Linus Torvalds once wrote in a book that he created Linux just for fun, but it ended up sparking a revolution. Git, his second major creation, also an accidental revolution. It’s now a standard tool for software engineers, but its origin story wasn’t so much fun this time, at least for Linus.

“Simplicity is a great virtue but it requires hard work to achieve it and education to appreciate it. And to make matters worse: complexity sells better.”

Many (and probably actually most) people are overconfident when predicting what other people think is obvious and often incorrectly assume that other people will think the same thoughts and find the same things obvious.

The companies building “DevOps” teams are going in the right direction, but they need to be moving away from infrastructure configuration management and towards platform engineering and enabling developer self-service.

The knowledge silos are good. The silos are a feature, not a bug.

Expertise is a good thing.

This surprising amount of detail is is not limited to “human” or “complicated” domains, it is a near universal property of everything from space travel to sewing, to your internal experience of your own mind.

Products seem to be made for users, but I think this might be an illusion; they are more like a medium for self-expression.

For many project team members, starting with the punch line can be disconcerting, but we have found that once they become accustomed to it, they truly enjoy the clarity of the message and the time saved in getting the point across.

A true story.

Henry Farrell and Cosma Shaliz argue that large language models have much older cousins in markets and bureaucracies

(Spoiler: trusting your contributors works)

This article discusses using CSS to make spinning 3D diagrams.

So Docker is an open-source software product, one that is basically free (as in beer and as in freedom) although hindered by a history of messy licensing situations. Docker is also a company, and companies are expected to produce revenue. And that's where other facets of the greater identity we call "Docker" come to light: Docker Desktop and Docker Hub.

In some situations, you come to realize that a whole bunch of bad things happen due to non-technical causes, and they are some of the hardest things that you might ever need to remove from an organization.

Why and how we continuously invested the team bandwidth to pay back tech debt and what were the results?

If you are considering a career in software engineering, be prepared to face these truths head-on and embrace the opportunity to grow.

This post will use the above question to explore DNS, dig, A records, CNAME records, and ALIAS/ANAME records from a beginner’s perspective.