Everett Toews

Asking for help is something everyone does. But when you ask for help, someone else is giving you their time and attention, a finite resource. If you put yourself in the shoes of the person helping you and make it as easy as possible for them, you’ll get better help faster. This post is geared towards getting help with problems in software development and operations, but most of the advice applies broadly.

Whether you’re new to AWS and just learning or you’re a seasoned veteran, working with AWS usually involves extensive experimentation. That means constantly creating, reading, updating, and deleting resources as you experiment. However, sometimes you forget to delete something or AWS automatically creates associated resources that you might not even be aware of that don’t get automatically deleted. It can all amount to considerable cruft in your account, which can be quite costly in terms of dollars or cognitive load as you have to sift through resources and question whether or not they are actually necessary. Be a tidy Kiwi and keep your AWS account clean!

There are numerous diagramming tools in the market and they all do a very good job of diagramming. However, almost all of them suffer from a fundamental problem that makes the diagrams they produce much less valuable. They make it impossible to share a rendered version of the diagram (e.g. png or jpg) that is conveniently editable. drawio.com has solved that problem brilliantly.

A curated list of learning resources I’ve used to evolve my own understanding of the principles and practices of DevOps.

Versioning is fundamental to reasoning about software development and deployment. It’s not just the software that you release that needs to be versioned. All of the supporting components need to be versioned too, such as database schemas, message formats, protocols, APIs, dependencies, etc. If you don’t version all of these components, you’re at a severe disadvantage when it comes to understanding what’s in a release or debugging a problem.

I recently did an ignite talk at DevOpsDays Auckland 2019 about GitOps. While doing the deck for the talk, I had a chance to really reflect on question “What is GitOps?”.