Last week saw the return of DevOpsDays to New York and like many who attended, I went into day one without a solid definition for, or real understanding of, what “DevOps” actually means. Does it mean wearing both dev and ops hats? Is it a new team outside of the existing dev and ops teams? Is it a tool?
I’ve spent the last few days since joining Better Advertising working on a new feature for a Firefox extension called Ghostery. We’ll be announcing the new feature soon, but until then I thought I’d share some of what I’ve learned so far. I’ve never worked on an extension before but as it turns out, it’s really quite easy to pick up; some fairly simple XML (aka XUL) for composing the UI and JavaScript for the rest. One of the trickier bits has to do with scope. After doing some testing I figured out that the entry point into an extension is via the browser window; that is, your extension code will be executed each time you open a new window and that means that all your code is basically scoped to a single window. ...
I recently needed to script some tasks for a Spring-based app at work so we could shove it into a crontab. It proved to be much easier than I thought. You can use your spring.xml config file for wiring up your beans as usual, but rather than deal with various property files you can easily override properties on the fly using system properties. See the following example: In your spring.xml make sure you have this line: ...
Del.icio.us (sorry, it’s just plain old “Delicious” now) 2.0 finally launched a few days ago and the response so far has been mixed. But now that the dust has settled some, it’s time to think about just how we got here and if it was really worth all the trouble. According to the official blog post, the new and improved Delicious brings us speed, usability, and oh so good looks among other features and it was a long time in the making. The Yahoo acquisition was announced on Dec 9, 2005 and the new site finally went live a little over two and a half years later on July 31, 2008. So why did it take them so long? ...
I still intend to finish the series of posts I started earlier, but this quote pretty much sums it up: In this regard management is also to blame, especially when it comes to dysfunctional schedules, wrong incentives, poor hiring, and demoralizing policies.
Is just getting the job done always enough? One of my personal philosophies is that if you’re not learning, you’re not improving. If you’re not improving, then what have you really accomplished? In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ve even gotten worse, if only because everyone else has gotten better. It’s like a television or movie series that comes back year after with the same old, tired formula. No better than previous iterations, and doesn’t even meet the expectations set by its predecessors. Think Bond, James Bond.
Commitment means being prepared to do extra things, going the extra mile Without a commitment from all the concerned parties, how can one expect any enterprise to be successful? Be it business, government, military or otherwise. My group has shown it’s commitment time and again, but we haven’t seen the same from others. How do you find the motivation to stay committed in a situation like that? I think I’ll just go to sleep instead. ...
I clocked out at 12:30am last night and I felt “guilty” about it. Why? I left the office at about 7:15pm today and I felt “guilty” about it. Why? I worked about 70 hours this week and I’m planning to work Saturday and Sunday. Why? If anything, the events of the week have made it clear to me that they don’t get it and I shouldn’t be working this hard. So… why? ...
according to steve:
It’s strange. Just because I’m back in New York for a couple of weeks before I go back to India, everyone just assumes that I’m here on vacation. If it was any other time of the year, I’m almost positive that I wouldn’t get this reaction at all. Stranger still, most of the people asking the question aren’t off either. What gives?