opinion - 🧑‍💻 Funky Penguin

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A collection of 39 posts

Making changes stick requires attention

Making changes stick requires attention

In The Design of Engineering Culture - DZone DevOps, a great read on “designing” your engineering culture, these two paragraphs jumped out at me: In addition to motivation, change requires attention. A fair amount of people’s attention is devoted to doing their work when everything is business as usual.

The PowerPoint-Killer

The PowerPoint-Killer

This post by James Thomas struck a chord with me. The post details the loss of the space shuttle Columbia (including 7 humans) in 2006. The fact is we know that PowerPoint kills. Most often the only victims are our audience’s inspiration and interest. This, however, is the story

Upping your 2FA SSH game

Upping your 2FA SSH game

I just read this interesting tutorial by @lizthegrey on adding 2 factor auth (2FA) to SSH, using either TOTP (time-based one-time password) or hardware auth tokens. Hi! I’m Liz, a Developer Advocate at honeycomb.io, and I spent my first weeks at the company doing security hardening of our

Why I chose Kubernetes over Docker Swarm

Why I chose Kubernetes over Docker Swarm

In Funky Penguin’s Geek Cookbook - Kubernetes Start, I introduced Kubernetes concepts with an explanation of why I chose Kubernetes for running cloud workloads: Why would you want to use Kubernetes for your self-hosted recipes over simple Docker Swarm? Here’s my personal take.. I use Docker swarm both

Should you do microcode updates?

Should you do microcode updates?

A colleague and I were discussing my recent rant re a RedHat-issued kernel update breaking VMs on all my AMD systems. Notwithstanding the fact that my RedHat bug report about the issue is set to “private” and Bugzilla (1990 called wants its UI back, to hang out with Miranda IM)

What is TurtleCoin and why do I care?

What is TurtleCoin and why do I care?

Some weeks ago I stumbled across TurtleCoin, while researching new cryptocurrencies to mine, on cryptunit.com. I rolled my eyes at the stupidity of the cryptogeeks, and moved on to mine some RavenCoin, which r/gpumining had told me was the new hotness. As I returned to cryptounit over the

Post-mortem review : DayOne sync outage and private data exposure

Post-mortem review : DayOne sync outage and private data exposure

I’m a long-term user of Day One, the premier journaling app for iOS/MacOS. In 2017, Day One introduced end-to-end encryption on user journals (which I use), to protect the journal data synced with their proprietary service (that became mandatory after Dropbox sync was dropped in v2) This morning,

Putting in extra work is lazy and makes you less effective

Putting in extra work is lazy and makes you less effective

In Work/Life Balance Will Make You a Better Software Engineer · Code Without Rules, I read: The final benefit of work/life balance is attitude: the way you think about your job. If you work extra hours on your normal job you are training yourself to do your work with

disasterrecovery

Disaster Recovery success story for Westpac NZ

In The Four Hundred–Bank Says ‘HA’ to System i Hardware Failure, I read the success story of the DR replication platform established to protect against the failure of a critical server for back-end processing for WestPac: Over the years, the company tested the Maxava software and its preparedness by

How instant messaging makes my life miserable

I recently read Is group chat making you sweat? — Signal v Noise, and it resonated with me so much that I re-read it specifically so that I could post and comment on the relevant sections. Preface I should comment that at my day job , we use Jabber for internal IM.

Lazy monitoring breaks stuff

In Outage Postmortem - July 20, 2016, we read about how a (technically complex) programming flaw brought down StackOverflow for 34 minutes. Aside for the technical description of the bug (which is interesting), what stands out to me is that the impact of the bug was so severe because the

Speak to the face

In How Regular One-on-One Meetings Saved Our Company Culture, Alex Turnbull highlights the value of regular, one-on-one meetings between management (in his case, CEO) and employees. A few comments / highlights below: People aren’t happy when they’re working on things they don’t care about. Part of avoiding that

Buy experiences, not gadgets

In The Science Of Why You Should Spend Your Money On Experiences, Not Things, I read: “One of the enemies of happiness is adaptation … “We buy things to make us happy, and we succeed. But only for a while. New things are exciting to us at first, but then we

Humanitarian aid should be open sourced

In “Beware the empathy-washing of self-proclaimed caring capitalists”, Evgeny Morozov warns of the risks of trusting large (for-profit) tech giants for humanitarian relief. His concern centres around the conflict of interests between a for-profit corporation and its humanitarian efforts: Not so long ago, the juxtaposition of “freedom” – something to be

How FaceBook avoids office politics

I just read through # How Facebook Tries to Prevent Office Politics, and noted the following: We’re not so naive as to think we can change human nature altogether; where there are humans, there will be feelings to consider, and politics will crop up. But when we approach our interactions

Why I won't post about my kids on social media

I read the following on the NYTimes today, and it ring true to my own concerns about how we expose our children’s digital history to the end of time, without considering the harm we may be doing.. Don’t Post About Me on Social Media, Children Say - NYTimes.

Why you need a guest wifi

This is a copy of a post I made at Medium.com, an experiment in distribution and exposure. It wasn’t very successful, so I’ve brought it back home to my blog. Dear Mom, here’s why you need a guest wifi network Edit: This is a generic post

Book Review - Reclaiming Conversation - Personal Development

I recently completed reading Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle. Sherry’s position is that the classic, face-to-face conversation is critical to our personal development and communication, but we are dangerously close to abandoning conversation for the lure of digital efficiency and control.

Book Review - Reclaiming Conversation - Family Development

I recently completed reading Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle. Sherry’s position is that the classic, face-to-face conversation is critical to our personal development and communication, but we are dangerously close to abandoning conversation for the lure of digital efficiency and control.

Book Review - Reclaiming Conversation - Professional Development

I recently completed reading Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle. Sherry’s position is that the classic, face-to-face conversation is critical to our personal development and communication, but we are dangerously close to abandoning conversation for the lure of digital efficiency and control.

Book Review - Reclaiming Conversation - The Illusion of Multitasking

I recently completed reading Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, by Sherry Turkle. Sherry’s position is that the classic, face-to-face conversation is critical to our personal development and communication, but we are dangerously close to abandoning conversation for the lure of digital efficiency and control.

EQ (vs IQ) is important in tech leaders too

I found it refreshing to read that ruthless efficiency and perfectionism is not the only way to captain a tech success. Compare the description of Page and Sundar below. About Page: “He could come off as very harsh,” said one person who has had many encounters with Page over the

IT Monitoring lessons learned from FCC report into 911 outage

IEEE Spectrum highlighted an FCC report into a 911 outage in April 2014, which resulted in over 11 million Americans.. or about three and half percent of the population of the United States, being at risk of not being able to reach emergency help through 911. I found the report

MacBook Air recommendation for cost-conscious newlyweds

A friend who recently got married asked for advice (below) on purchasing a MacBook Air, and I thought it might be useful to record my response here: We are thinking of getting a MacBook Air as we liked the idea of a Mac Mini but with both of us still

Do less to be more productive

In “Your organization sucks at innovating”, Shane Parrish discusses innovation (or lack thereof) within an organisation: Want to kill innovation? Make people attend meetings all day. Send them emails every 30 seconds. Bombard them with too much work. Kill their enthusiasm. Make them write pages of pointless prose to justify