Invariant Properties

Someone recently asked me a good question – where are all of my posts? I was posting regularly and then pretty much stopped.

The answer is that I haven’t stopped blogging – I’ve been blogging on the Confluence server at work. They were non-public posts since they deals with proprietary information or (never) our dirty laundry.

It’s an interesting dilemma since there’s a sizable number of people who believe that if you have two equally qualified candidates the blogger will be a better team member than the non-blogger – but the blogger may not be free to discuss it in depth since it’s only for internal consumption. Qualified people may be overlooked during the pre-screening process. A first glance it would make sense to focus on the public blog but there are many more reasons to focus on issues that directly relate to your work.

On a personal note there are a few comments. First, my employer is planning to reach out to our third-party users more and that includes creating a technical blog. I’ll post a link to it when appropriate.

Second, over the past few months we have made a huge commitment to Infrastructure as Code (IAC) and I’ve been point person since I’m also have decent sysadmin skills. (Did I mention I passed the LPIC-2?) The first few months were getting comfortable with Ansible and co-developing our infrastructure with the cloudops team but now we’re starting to integrate this into our software lifecycle. The ultimate goal is a travis framework that lets us easily run through the same tests across a broad cross-section of resources, e.g., automatically run tests against the last 5 versions of our database server or the last 8 versions of Cloudera. I hope this will be generic enough to share.