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Where has Technitribe been for the last 2 years? The short answer: in domain limbo.
Christmas Islands
.cxis a Christmas Islands top-level domain (TLD). I did not have the domain set to auto-renew because I was trying to get away from my old registrar. At the time it was expiring I didn’t have the cash on hand to renew it. I will admit, I did not read all the Term & Conditions for the.cxTLD before registering. I guess I really screwed the pooch there.It turns out that if you have a
.cxdomain, and it expires, then you have a problem. They will effectively hold it hostage for a period of 4 months. During this time you have the “option” to restore the domain, but at the cost of $400.00 USD. Like I said, I was not very cash flush at the time.Waiting Period
Shortly after the domain expired I moved across the country. While getting set up in my new location the domain left the restoration period and was open to general registration again. As is typical, a reseller had squatted the
lnx.cxdomain and bought it as soon as it became available. I resigned myself to my fate, I would have to let it go for a while.Return of lnx.cx
The blog is now back! A few weeks ago I finally had the cash necessary to register it from a new registrar who isn’t evil (Netim). We have a new SSL Certificate issued by Let’s Encrypt, no more untrusted RapidSSL security alerts in your browser. And, as an aside, the setup for installing this new certificate was incredibly easy. I am genuinely surprised at how smooth it was using the certbot tool.
What’s Next?
I need to start writing more blog posts! I might shift the focus of the blog from being so Tech focused and open it up to capture some of my other interests, too. Such as woodworking. I really enjoy making and restoring furniture. I should write some blog posts about that.
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Back in late 2013 I joined what was jokingly referred to as the Red Hat IT “DevOps” team. We didn’t like that name, so we changed it and there-after became officially known as Team Inception. From the time the team was formed, we all accepted that the team was to retire in 18-24 months. We were totally cool with that too! To us having a pure “DevOps” team in perpetuity just didn’t make sense.
Over the course of the team’s lifespan I feel like I experienced incredible growth, both personally and professionally. I’m proud to look back at all the cool things we accomplished as a team, and I’m even more thankful to have had the opportunity to be a member of that team. Here’s a taste of some things we did as a team publicly:
- Blogged a bunch of posts for Red Hat Developer Blog
- Created a functioning Continuous Deployment system, Release Engine [Docs]
- Created jsonstats, a tool for exporting system information over a REST interface
- And another tool, Talook, which provides a view into jsonstats running on a collection of servers
- Cacophony, a simple REST API for automatic SSL certificate generation
- The Ansible XML module. This grew in popularity so much that we realized the best way to ensure it lives on was by transferring complete ownership over to Chris Prescott, a former contributor (Thanks Chris)!
- git-branch-blacklist – A git-hook based system for blacklisting pushes to specific branches
Two week ago (2015-06-20 → 2015-06-24) the DevNation and Red Hat Summit 2015 conferences were held in Boston, MA. Of the many excellent speakers and panel groups [S|D] that held sessions during the conferences, there’s one group I am especially fond of: My old team, Inception.
On Wednesday, July 24th we held a panel session called Bootstrapping a DevOps Movement in Red Hat IT. This was our final activity together as Team Inception. During this panel-style session Jen Krieger, our Product Owner/Scrum Master, facilitated a look back at some of our experiences during our 18 months as the Red Hat IT “DevOp Team”.
We began the initial round of questions with what our individual perceptions of “DevOps” were before the team had formed. We followed that with what ended up being a great Q&A with the audience (thank you everyone who participated!). We ended the panel with our closing thoughts on what “DevOps” means to each of us now.
Here’s a snippet from the official session description:
Topics will include
- What we accomplished. We’ll take you step-by-step through how we deliver our work using a combination of open source tools, including Docker.
- How we rate both our cultural and tooling success.
- Roadblocks, disruptions, and surprises we encountered and how we handled them.
- How this project has changed the way we view our jobs and our work relationships.
- What’s next for the team.
Panel
- Tim Bielawa, Release Engineering / Development
- Ryan Cook, System Administration
- Steve Milner [blog], Security / Development
- Chris Murphy, System Administration
Panel facilitator
- Jen Krieger [pinterest], Agile Coach & Original Inception Product Owner
Between ourselves, we casually referred to this as our final team retrospective, an honest (and very public) look-back at lessons learned over the last year and a half.
Click play below to watch the full video now, or go directly to it on YouTube.
And before I forget. So much thanks to Andrew “Hoss” Butcher [GH] for recording, editing, and posting the recording for us. I (we) owe you many Tasty Beverages for that.
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This is an update to my previous post about my (then) upcoming conference presentation.
The slides from my session at Red Hat Summit 2014, JBoss in the Trenches, are now posted online. Most of the slides have generous amounts of extra material in their notes.
- JBoss_In_The_Trenches.pdf – 2.57MiB
- JBoss_In_The_Trenches.odp – 8.51MiB
And as a bonus, here’s a select few pictures from the trip to San Francisco:
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- Room Schedule
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- Audience
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- Start Something Different
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Gave the Open Source Scholarship talk today with @akbutcher. It was a smash hit. We were lucky to get a lot of great promotion around the internet for this event:
- WVU Today
- OpenSource.com
- A plethora of Twitter/G+/Facebook posts (27% of referrals)
I also want to give Michael Dehaan a huge thank you for his cameo today. The students loved it!
The presentation is available online: Open Source: A Guide. I was referring to it as our self documenting presentation, in that virtually everything Andrew and I touched on during the talk was linked from within the preso slides.
Thanks to all the students who came out (especially the folks who asked questions). We’re doing this for you!
Michael Dehaan on Google Hangout
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Open Source Scholars
I’m super proud to be able to say this today:
Some of my friends and I have started a scholarship at West Virginia University. We’re calling it the “Open Source Scholarship“. Here’s our pitch:
The Problem: Paying for school is hard, when you’re finished you haven’t learned enough skills to set you apart from your peers, and your resume is unimpressive.
This is a scholarship to motivate young adults to become involved in open source communities.
Committee members working professionally in the open source market will use their collective 30 years experience to recommend students based on the impact of their contributions.
We’ll show you what open source is all about: how to negotiate the open source ecosystem, show you were to get started, and walk you through your first contributions.
On April 23rd of this month @akbutcher and I will taking a few days off from work to fly back to Morgantown, WV where we’ll make the official announcement to the students. Immediately following the announcement we’ll give the what open source is about and how to become involved in it prezo. We’re hoping that if we pull it off right the students will feel comfortable enough to go out and start looking for ways to become involved.
We know what we’re asking the students to do isn’t trivial, so we’re not going to leave them all on their own! After the announcement has been made we’ll be maintaining an IRC channel on freenode.net and handing out our contact information.
The students will have from the day of the official announcement through the Friday before Thanksgiving this year to make contributions. We’ve put together a simple submission portal where they can enter and track their contributions.
I am so excited to see this take off! Check out the official scholarship website for all the details:
http://OpenSourceScholars.org
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Technitribe by Tim Bielawa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.