I was listening to Core Intuition a few weeks back and Manton said that if anyone was interested in his project to let him know, and he would send a couple of stickers. I was interested, so I emailed him a quick note, and quickly forgot about it.

Yesterday an envelope arrived in the mail with two stickers and a handwritten note. I’m looking forward to his new project, that Manton Reece seems like a stand-up guy.

Monday I was offered a new position, yesterday I accepted it. I’m hoping that this is the last time I’ll have to look for a job for a very, very long time. Having an unexpected change in your career and having to search for a new job is one of the most stressful things a person can do. It was hard, I didn’t sleep well.

I did get to talk to a lot of interesting and smart people though, and got a view of what their challenges were and what their company was like. Most of the people I spoke with were at a company that was growing fast, and they were looking for help scaling and automating their infrastructure, something I’ve come to specialize in. I applied for thirty-four positions, got back twenty-one responses, spoke with twelve companies, and found three positions where I was a near perfect fit.

Of the companies I spoke with, one of the common themes I heard again and again was “I read your blog.” Through my writing here they were able to take a look back through my history, understand how I convey information, and generally get to know me better. One of the first things I did after I started the search was write two blog posts explaining how I came to be where I am in my career, and what I believe DevOps to be.

Writing these posts served two functions. Most importantly it forced me to think through what I was trying to say, to understand what I think about the topic, and convey that in a way that’s concise and understandable. After writing the posts, when the questions inevitably came up during an interview, I was better able to answer without rambling.

I’ve often wondered if keeping this site up was worth my time, my experience during the past month prove, at least to me, that time spent blogging is time well spent. It’s an investment in my future, a calling card to the world. This site is my little corner of the Internet.

Everyone’s professional path follows a slightly different trajectory. We are each a unique recipe of skills, experience, and interests, which shape who we are and how we come to be in the careers that we have. My experience in moving from a systems administrator to a devops role is unique, because, well, we are all unique.

Somewhere around January of 2010 I saw a shift in the future of the systems administrator role. Automation systems and cloud services were going to change things, and I knew that to stay relevant I was going to have to change too. At the time I felt a bit of an entrepreneurial pull, and decided I was going to be an independent Mac developer. I bought the book, set my alarm for an hour earlier each morning, and spent that hour digging through the book learning Cocoa and Objective-C. I did this for months, reading every page, every chapter, and finishing every programming challenge. At the end of the book I started working on my first app, an adoption of a shell script I called “go”.

Go was basically a bookmark manager, but it let you bookmark anything on your Mac. I used it to quickly SSH to servers, mount NFS shares, launch internal management web apps, and other administrative tasks. I was a bit enamored by the delicious generation at the time, and made some rather, well, regrettable UI choices. When the Mac App Store was announced, I knew that I wanted to get my app in there on day one, so I started working right away on version two, or, Go2. Go2 launched in the MAS in 2011, but never sold enough to make it worthwhile. So, after taking a break from development, I started working on the next app, a static blogging app I called “Paragraphs”. I worked on this app for months, launched it, watched it fizzle out, and decided I needed to rethink my professional goals.

During this same period I went to grad school for Human-Computer Interaction. I still saw that I needed to change my professional career path, I was fascinated by design and the science of how we use these machines, and felt it a personal goal of mine to have a graduate degree. So, nights and weekends for two years I was neck deep in a mix of psychology, Adobe Illustrator, OmniGraffle, Silverback, and Python. I graduated with a Masters degree in HCI in 2012, spent a few months at a start up in Des Moines, went back to CDS, and the following year shut down my development company. All while holding down a full time job and raising a family. To say I was stressed doesn’t even come close.

At CDS I was a Linux sysadmin, but I was also very deeply involved in the design and deployment of the architecture. After my boss quit I applied for and was appointed to a new position titled “Systems Architect Consultant”, which was kind of a fancy term for special projects and development. I had been studying automation, cloud architecture, high availability, and the myriad of other topics surrounding devops, but as the systems architect I was solely devoted to researching those topics and designing solutions based on my research. Around the end of my time there CDS sent me to AWS re:Connect, where I was kickstarted into learning just how big AWS was, and the reality of what I foresaw years before hit me with full force.

I could tell that things were not going well at the company though, and two months before a big round of layoffs I made the move to work for a small software shop named Future Health Software as a systems automation engineer. Unfortunately, between the time I interviewed for the position and the time I was hired, the company was acquired by an investment firm that also acquired Future Health’s biggest competitor, Chirotouch.

Not wanting to concern myself with any of the internal politics or rivalries involved in merging two previously competing companies, I dug into my work and learned everything I could about running production workloads on AWS. I kept an open mind, and learned that the AWS systems were meant to be used like a development framework, bootstrapping an application in the most efficient way possible. Of course, most places hadn’t used the service like this, especially the ones that had been using AWS since all that was available was EC2 and S3. So, I set about rebuilding the entire architecture, six years of it, in CloudFormation code, and developing a deployment system based on CodeDeploy.

After several months of setbacks, wrong turns, and distractions of managing the legacy environment, I had a system that could rebuild the entire infrastructure from scratch. I’m quite proud of that work, and hope to someday put it under a production workload. Unfortunately, before I got the chance, the company closed our office and announced that we were going to be let go. Which brings us to today.

Over the years as I’ve worked out where I want to be in my professional life I’ve learned many different technologies. I’ve spent time digging through the Linux kernel source and reading RFCs, I’ve learned to think pragmatically, read and understand code, and build systems from the ground up. I’ve also learned how the people who use the systems I build actually use them, and how the design choices I make affect the usability and reliability of the system.

For me, the path to get from a sysadmin to a devops engineer travelled from Unix to Linux, through Cocoa and Objective-C, past Python and PHP, stopping in HCI, design, and UX, back to Linux, Docker, and now on to the cloud. And you know, what? It’ll never stop. The tech industry moves fast, you’ve got to keep learning your entire life to stay on the right side of that wave. You’ll either ride it, or be crushed by it, but it’ll never stop.

So, be open to learning new things, try something out of the ordinary, push yourself to try something you haven’t done before, and always do your absolute best. I promise it’ll be a heck of a ride.

The phrase “DevOps” gets thrown around quite a bit, so I thought it might be helpful for me to write down exactly what it means to me. DevOps is the evolution of systems administration. A few years ago, I noticed that the SysAdmin field was finally starting to change, after years of being relatively static. For decades, A sysadmin would set up the hardware, install the operating system, setup SSH (or, telnet in the bad old days), install your application, and get it running. Even when virtualization became more mainstream and worked its way into production workloads, it didn’t change the core tasks of a sysadmin. There were simply more boxes to manage, and without appropriate configuration management, each virtual machine became a unique little snow flake. A few tools became more commonplace like CFEngine, Puppet, or Chef to ease the burden of virtual machine sprawl, but it wasn’t until cloud computing came along that the role of a sysadmin really started to change.  

I realized that the traditional role of a sysadmin was going to change over next few years, and I needed to be on the right side of the this wave of change. Today’s sysadmin needs to know code – because the entire infrastructure is based on code. DevOps as a concept means to me that the mindset of a traditional sysadmin in a data center wasn’t going to cut it for the kind of skills needed for the new environment. Hardware doesn’t matter, operating systems don’t matter, the only thing that matters is the ability to run the application, and run it in a way that is stable, scaleable, and secure. 

One has to completely change the way they think about infrastructure. A common flaw that I’ve seen is trying to treat AWS like your data center. AWS will let you do that, gladly, but it will be expensive. It’s utility computing, like water. You get your water from the local water company, and you pay for what you use. The water company will let you turn on your faucet and just run water all day, but it will charge you for it and you will pay for far more than what you actually need. That’s why you have to have tooling, in this example a faucet to turn the water off and on. In a similar manner, you need automation systems in your infrastructure to scale up and down as needed.  

The other part of the evolution is that you have to stop thinking of the infrastructure as a systems administration task, and instead think of AWS and other cloud providers more like an application programming framework. Tying into building blocks like legos, and picking the appropriate parts to run your application. 

Systems administration is evolving in the same way programming languages have, building up to ever higher layers of abstraction. DevOps is simply working with the developers to build the best possible system to run the application.

And everything is changing for me again. The CTO of the company I work for spoke with me yesterday, our office is being shut down and they are laying off the staff. I’ve got till March 1st to find something new.

If anyone is looking for a good devops guy, let me know!

My brief experiment with mutt ended mostly how I expected it would. With me turning on my email in Mail.app again and carrying on as normal. I try to understand the draw to using such an archaic tool as mutt, but there’s simply nothing about it that appeals to me. Not at this stage of my life anyway.

This time someone emailed me a PDF that I needed to sign and send back to her. A simple process with Mail.app, but I knew that I was going to have to jump through hoops and spend an hour reading the documentation to figure out how to respond with an attachment with mutt. Come to think of it, I should amend my previous statement on how well I know the app. I know how to read and organize my email in mutt, and I can use it to build an offline mirror of my hosted email. I can build a search index for it, and send plain text email. I know how to view attachments and how to use a command line web browser to view HTML email. But, the one thing I didn’t know how to do was the one thing I needed to get done. Something trivially simple with the built in mail client.

So, to the wayside it went. While I was at it, I decided to do some cleaning up of the rest of my command line tools as well. I uninstalled everything I had installed with brew with a simple command:

brew uninstall brew list

Then I reinstalled the few command programs that I knew I needed for work.

brew install jq jsmin rbenv

This mass uninstall also removed MacVim. Something I’ve had conflicting feelings about for a while now. As I said in my last post, MacVim excels at editing text, but I realize I set up a bit of a straw man comparing it with TextEdit. Obviously TextEdit was never the competition with MacVim, instead, I should have been comparing it with BBEdit and Ulysses, my other two text editors of choice.

Like Vim, BBEdit and Ulysses are power tools, but unlike Vim they are Mac power tools. They are built specifically for the Mac environment, by small teams who are dedicated to their craft, and who charge a reasonable, sustainable rate for their product. They approach their jobs in different ways, and are very different applications. BBEdit is built for developers and sysadmins, and has depths of integration and feature set that I’m only just beginning to explore. Ulysses is built for writing prose, and it’s where I’m writing this. Honestly, it’s beautiful.

We live in a blessed era of Mac productivity. We have almost an embarrassment of riches when it comes to incredibly well crafted third party applications, and we still have access to all the low-level Unix tools that attracted me to the platform thirteen years ago. I’ve waffled back and forth over using the old tools and adopting new ones, but I’m getting too old for that. I simply want my tools to work for me. As of right now, I don’t imagine I’ll be going back to mutt, vim, or anything else command line. Not when there are fantastic Mac apps that do the job either just as well, or better.

After reading through Matt Gemmell’s latest post on mutt and the good doctor’s response, I fired up my old mutt config and gave it another run through. Well, after being a bit snarky on Twitter, of course.

I’m always of two minds when it comes to using Unix tools on a Mac. On the one hand, I want to live in the future, where everything is beautiful and powerful, simple and easy to use, but functional enough to do everything I want. That future might never come, but sometimes it feels as if its right around the corner. On the other hand, I know Unix. I make my living on the command line, and have for years. I’ve got a customized .vimrc file that’s setup just the way I like it. I know how to zip around mutt. I could even setup mpd to play music instead of iTunes if I felt like it. That constant friction of how I wish things were hits up against how I know things are on a daily basis.

I know how to get things done quickly and efficiently, but sometimes I just don’t want to do it that way. I want to live in the future, not the past. But, once you know how to use the power tools, the knowledge will forever be present in the back of your mind, a quiet voice that says “you know how to do this, you know how to make this better”. However, it’s important to know when to take advantage of a power tool, and to avoid unnecessarily fetishizing the command line.

Living in the Apple ecosystem has benefits. Pictures I put in the Photos app are available everywhere. Likewise with music in iTunes Match. Any document I edit in TextEdit is automatically versioned without my needing to think about it. Apple designs their products to work well together, but they also design them to appeal to the largest audience possible, which may or may not include me.

Take TextEdit as an example. It’s a basic text editor, it can edit a Markdown document just fine, but when I edit Markdown in MacVim I’ve got access to my years of keyboard navigation and key combos for doing things like inserting links and switching between inline links and reference links. As previously mentioned, TextEdit automatically versions it’s documents, but with a couple of modifications, so does MacVim. TextEdit is a general purpose tool, MacVim is a power tool, they are not really in the same category, except they can both edit a text document.

Maybe that’s the differentiation I’ve been searching for. TextEdit can, as it’s name implies, edit text files, but MacVim excels at it. Mail can send and receive email, it’s a general tool best for most people. Mutt is a power tool, best for specific use cases when you already have the background knowledge to be able to take advantage of it.

Knowing how to use the power tools will make you a better computer user. Knowing when to use a particular tool, and knowing which tool is the best one for the job, makes you an expert.

Sometimes I think I’d like a really great magazine, like The New Yorker, but for Mac geeks. A beautifully printed, monthly magazine with all the best news, tips, opinions, analysis, predictions, and howtos from the Mac community. I’m not looking for what Macworld used to be, I’m thinking more along the lines of The Atlantic. Something classy, something worthy of printing and keeping out in the living room under the coffee table. Something I’d look forward to reading cover to cover every month.

Of course, it would have the best of John Gruber for the month, something argumentative from Marco Arment, and maybe a bit of Mac history from Stephen Hackett. The tech news would be covered by Jim Dalrymple, Jason Snell, and Dan Moren. Shawn Blanc and Matt Gemmell would add some flavor to the mix, we’d get a taste of the future from Federico Viticci, and on the back page would be Dr. Drang’s script of the month. To be honest, I’d probably read that last page first, and then read the rest of it. Heck, Gruber could call the entire magazine Daring Fireball and color the entire front of the magazine gray with his star lightly embossed in a slightly darker gray and, well, it would be fantastic.

Perhaps it’s a bit silly to be dreaming of a magazine at the end of 2015, but it’s something that doesn’t exist that I wish did. If I wish it existed, I’m sure there must be others who would like it too. A physical, intentionally designed magazine with beautiful print, carefully chosen advertisements, and pages that felt good when you flipped them. Something that felt like it might be around in a hundred years, if you take care of it.

Of course, as far as I know none of these folks are interested in collaborating on such an endeavor. Each of them is building their own business, building membership programs and selling ads. I added up a few of my favorite sites membership programs to see what the monthly total would be:

• Six Colors $6/mo
• The Loop $3/mo
• MacStories $5/mo
• Relay.fm $5/mo
• Shawn Blanc $4/mo
• Matt Gemmell $4/mo
• Brooks Review $4/mo

Total: $31/mo

For comparison, the New York Times sells for $35 per month for the “All Digital Access” package. You can subscribe to The New Yorker for less than five dollars per month, and subscribing to The Atlantic for a year equates to paying $2.50 per issue for ten issues. Food for thought.

Of course, I can’t end this dreamy article without mentioning Marco’s ill fated “The Magazine”. What I’m proposing and what The Magazine turned out to be aren’t really in the same ballpark, other than having some of our favorite characters involved in its creation. The Magazine was purposefully not a “tech” magazine, it was about writing. It was also not a printed magazine, it was a subscription digital magazine aimed at the iPad’s Newsstand app. What I’m proposing is an old fashioned printed magazine, about tech, with my personal favorite writers, superbly designed and excellently illustrated. It would be awesome.

So, of course it will never exist.

So, I won NaNoWrimo, and wrote a “novel”. Although, it’s not really a novel, more like a novella, and it’s not really written just yet, it’s 50,000 words that somewhat make up a complete story, but with more plot holes than you can shake a stick at. Couple that with the number of inconsistencies in the world building, flat characters, characters who’s names I forget half way through the writing, and two chapters that I decided I was going to throw away completely, and you’ve got what is colloquially known as a first draft.

Here’s how I did it.

Minimize Decisions

If you’ve read my old posts, you might have picked up that I was once a big fan of Vim and the command line. Those days have past. Vim can be fun, but it can also be one of the biggest time sinks I’ve ever encountered. Can you write long form in Vim? Sure, but it takes more self discipline than I have to not try to tweak the configuration just a little bit more.

Instead, I wrote my story using the excellent Ulysses editor, “a powerful tool made for writers.” In fact, I’m using it to write this right now.

Set Daily Goals

My favorite feature of Ulysses is the word count goal. To win NaNoWriMo you need to write at least fifty-thousand words in thirty days. So, divide fifty-thousand by thirty and you get one-thousand six-hundred sixty-seven words per day. I set up thirty “sheets” in Ulysses, and attached the daily word goal to each one. I labeled each sheet as a chapter, and wound up with three acts of ten chapters each.

When I sat down to write each day, I wrote until the Ulysses goal circle turned green and wrapped up the chapter. Being able to keep an eye on the daily goal, and knowing that if I met it the circle would turn green gave me a great sense of accomplishment throughout the month. I always knew how much I had to write, and that I was on track.

Enforce Focus

If left to my own devices I’m perfectly happy to check Twitter every ten to fifteen minutes. Or seconds, depending on the day. I knew that I was going to have to give up everything distracting and time wasting to focus completely on writing. To help I signed up with RescueTime. RescueTime tracks how you use your computer, and sends you an email with weekly reports on how you’ve spent your time. You can classify websites or apps as highly productive or time wasters, and you can use the “Get Focused…” feature to block time wasting sites for a specified period of time. I’d shoot for an hour at a time of enforced focus, and wound up getting a lot done.

Prepare

Months before NaNoWriMo started, I started brainstorming in MindNode and outlining my plans in OmniOutliner. I used these two tools to explore the universe I was building, flesh out characters and motivations, define a (somewhat) cohesive plot, and plan out a chapter by chapter flow of what should be going on at a given point in the story.

It didn’t take long for the story to take on a life of it’s own and diverge from the outline I so meticulously wrote up, but knowing it was there was a huge mental safety net, I knew that no matter how far off course I got, if I needed to I could refer back to the outline and get the story back to where it needed to be.

BIC

More than one night I nearly didn’t meet my goal. I had nights where each and every word had to be pulled kicking and screaming out of my head and through my hands. I had nights where I was so tired that I literally fell asleep while typing, and had to go back and remove the gibberish on the screen. Then again, I had nights where the story almost wrote itself, where I was merely the conduit for the story to be told, and the goal was met in an hour or so. The important thing was that no matter what, I was writing. Every day.

Sit down and write, lose yourself in the story, get excited about action, and be thoughtful during introspective scenes. Most of all, just keep writing. Don’t edit, don’t worry and fuss over sentence structure, there will be plenty of time for that after November. Put your butt in the chair and write.

Let me start by saying that US Cellular has the best coverage in Iowa. No matter where we go in the state, we’ve got a great signal, almost always in LTE. My Internet access is fast, and I can’t remember the last time I dropped a call. The cellular service is great, and the only reason I stick with US Cellular. After days like today I need to remind myself of these facts, because almost every time I interact with them face to face, on the phone, or over the Internet I leave frustrated and feeling like I’m being duped.

I got an advertisement email from them a week or so ago. That in itself is questionable because I’m sure I unsubscribed, but whatever, we’ll leave that alone for now. The email’s subject line advertised “Act now and we’ll waive the Activation Fee – a $25 value!” Knowing that my wife and daughter were due for new phones I forwarded the email to her and suggested that maybe now was the right time. She agreed, and the first chance the two of us had time we headed to our closest store. We’ll call this Store Number One.

The staff at Store Number One were knowledgeable, pleasant, and courteous. We came in, sat down, told her that we wanted to upgrade two lines, and she went to get the 16GB iPhone 6S. At the mention of the 16GB model I hit the brakes, I knew that would not be enough for her, she has a 16GB model now and it’s too full to work properly. We asked for the 64GB version, but they didn’t have any in stock. The woman we were working with was kind enough to call around to several of the other stores in town, and finally found one with a few in stock that was only a ten to fifteen minute drive from where we were. We thanked her for her help and left for Store Number Two.

Store Number Two was nearly empty, and we were sat down right away. The store had the right phones in the right sizes in stock, and we were ready to close the deal. Then my wife remembered the email about waving the activation fee, and we asked if they would honor the advertisement. The agent didn’t know anything about it, and asked if I still had a copy of it. I did, (in my email trash, but I still had it), and he took my phone to show the email to his manager. They talked for quite a while, and the manager decided that they couldn’t honor the no activation fee in the store, but said if we went online we could get it there. We talked it over briefly and decided that it was probably a good idea to save $50 and wait a day or two and headed home to get online, Store Number Three.

While online with Store Number Three, I noticed in my account that it didn’t appear that the correct discount was being applied to one of our lines. At this point, I need to make a brief digression to explain the importance of this particular discount.

US Cellular, like all the other major carriers, has shifted away from subsidizing smart phones and instead is financing. To offset the price of financing the phone, US Cellular is offering to discount the normal $40 monthly “connection fee” per line down to $20. Then the financing of the phone costs $15-$30 or so, making the offer more desirable because the monthly cost of owning the phone stays roughly the same.

When I looked at my bill online, I didn’t see the discounted connection fee, I saw the full $40 fee and the finance charge for the phone. I knew this was wrong, so I clicked on the live customer support chat button and was connected with a representative. I explained my situation as best as I could, and she did the appropriate amount of checking. She found two problems: one, the online view I was seeing did not reflect the correct connection fee, but the view she was seeing did. The line I was asking about was getting the discounted fee. And two, the other two lines on my account were not getting the discounted fee, and should have been. She corrected this issue, and I was happy to move along, although I was still a bit apprehensive that what I was seeing online was not representative of reality. I even pulled up a recent bill and started going through it to make sure it was correct there.

Once I was happy enough with the existing monthly bill, I asked the representative in chat about waiving the activation fee, like the associate in the store said. Apparently I was misinformed.

I do apologize that isn’t accurate you will still get charged the activation fee for the phone it is $25.00 when you finance. I apologize for the information that was provided.

Ok, great, so we could have stayed at the store in town and bought the phones there. No saving $50 today I guess. But, just to make sure, I asked her about the email I got. She responded:

If you received an email with that information did it give you a promo code with it?


“If”? What do you mean “if”? I looked through the email and didn’t see a promo code, but I did find some type of code at the bottom of the email. I sent that to her but she couldn’t find anything, so she asked me to forward the email to her, which I did. She then disappeared for a while, and came back with the final answer:

Thank you so much for holding we didn’t find that promotion but, that is only if you get the tablet and the activation fee for the tablet would be waived that isn’t for the cell phones. I do apologize.


To which I said that it wasn’t clear from the email at all that the offer was only for an Android tablet.

Awesome have I addressed all of your concerns for you today?


 Awesome.

So, we went through three stores, three representatives, and found at least four errors in the US Cellular system. It seems to me that at least one of them could have gone ahead and said, “sure, we’ll be happy to honor that email you got, even if it wasn’t originally intended this way.”

I always leave my dealings with US Cellular with the not-so-faint feeling that I’m getting ripped off.