I have interviewed many DevOps engineers in my time and I've hired some amazing people as a result. To understand what makes a great DevOps Engineer, first, a definition via Gemini:

A DevOps engineer bridges the gap between software development and IT operations. They automate and streamline the software delivery process, building systems that allow development teams to release code quickly and reliably while maintaining robust infrastructure stability.

To break this definition down into the pieces that make up a list of interview questions I might ask, let's get a bit more granular about some of these.

bridges the gap between software development and IT operations

To me, this means an engineer with experience understanding the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), the practice of developing, testing and shipping code and understanding important facets of that including security, logging/feedback, observability and sustainability (the bridge part!).

automate and streamline the software delivery process

This would include developing pipelines in continuous-delivery tools, adding GRC (governance, risk and compliance) related gates into those pipelines, developing clean observability with alerting-and-monitoring, and automating all of this with a process like GitOps.

maintaining robust infrastructure stability

This might mean developing infrastructure in the public-cloud with IaC (Infrastructure-as-Code) tools like Terraform, CloudFormation or other APIs, which would also include managing the lifecycle of the infrastructure that hosts the code we deploy.

What's interesting about some of the engineers I meet is that each of these varying skills are sometimes "siloed" at some companies, where there is segmentation-of-duties across this space. By this I mean:

• Software Engineer:
  Develops code and moves it to the proper branch for deployment, and may own some of the CI process for tagging, branching etc.
• Release Engineer:
  Owns the code-repositories, pipeline lifecycle and release tagging, merging and even the release of code
• Pipeline Developer:
  Develops the end-to-end pipelines as part of the CICD lifecycle and ensures all GRC gates are in place to ensure software quality
• Infrastructure Developer:
  Develops IaC only and maintains state of all cloud based infrastructure
• Operations/Observability Engineer:
  Owns the observability, feedback, monitoring, alerting, paging and incident processes related to code running in (usually) Production environments. This is typically spans a variety of third-party software to manage as well

This varies greatly from company-to-company, but at least for the teams I've managed, understanding how to wear each of these hats is important for the work that the DevOps engineer owns.

What's unfortunate with companies that do silo these functions, is that the operational knowledge of these engineers is focussed on a single facet of the end-to-end SDLC and DevOps process.

When interviewing engineers who've either been siloed into this situation, or have chosen to focus on one part of this process, they tend to show that they've become quite weak on the other components that make a strong DevOps engineer.

That now begs the question:

For me, build something that other people will use: a website, a simple API, a web-app or software tool. Show me:

• You've actually programmed something that works, that has tests both as unit-based or pipelined (or both).
• There exists a build process based on a tag or branch and releases adhere to these items as the versions of your software
• You host your software somewhere (public or private) and there exists an automated pipeline that runs to build, test and deploy the software with good feedback about operations (smoke-test), helpful logs, and telemetry to help fix things if they break
• You might have set up observability on your software including monitors and alerting based on logs/metrics or personas to continually test and alert if they fail while using your software
• There exists good, well architected security practices around your software like Authentication, Authorization, network policies, rate-limiting, encryption, secret management, frequent API-key rotation, input-validation and more
• Perhaps most-importantly, despite the ability for AI to do almost all of this for you, understand why these things are important and have opinions about certain ways you prefer to develop and implement these items

My interviews

I like to understand what interests you in applying to the DevOps engineering position I'm interviewing for. What motivates you, what interests you and perhaps how do you want to be challenged?

I will drill in to specific items on a resumé, specifically if you've listed you're an expert in something; truth be told, I will go deep on these ones!! Usually this is a general discussion about what you've achieved and what you might be proud of (and why!)

I will ask questions about a hypothetical application planned for public consumption. There are no wrong answers here, but be forewarned, this is where I find out if you're able to wear all the hats or not based on the breadth of your answer (and experience...).

Perhaps most important, the engineers that I have hired and seen bloom into extremely strong and relied-upon DevOps Engineers are the people who:

• are enthusiastic about problem solving,
• don't complain about on-call,
• are efficient and diligent about delivering on their tasks or projects,
• have a strong technical and operational breadth and understanding of the above mentioned areas,
• are able to understand other company-team-problems and how they might relate to items DevOps might own,
• aren't afraid to say: I don't know...
• develop strong relationships with their team and the organization in general

This may sound like I only hire Senior to Staff or better DevOps engineers. This is simply not true. I've hired engineers who at some companies are considered junior or intermediate into Senior roles. I've even hired Staff engineers who weren't super strong at programming, but could problem-solve, develop hypotheses and even stub out some pseudo-code.

Does this sound like you? Keep an eye on the job board at Auvik where I am usually hiring new DevOps engineers into my team!

It's been a while since I drafted a new post on my personal site and I've also landed a new gig at an amazing company called Auvik.

Auvik is an interesting company that does primarily Network Management, but also Server Monitoring, Endpoint Monitoring and SaaS Management. What's funny is that I found out about Auvik via their promotions both on Reddit and Instagram where if you sign up for one of these services you receive a free Ubiquiti Switch, which, for me was awesome because I run my entire home network on Ubiquiti hardware. I've been working here since November and it's a pretty amazing place to work. Great people, great challenges, great leadership and perhaps most importantly, No Assholes!

There are other principles laid out in The Auvik Way™ but my favourite is this one. These are the primary facets of Auvik's culture and business.

As for the website, since I ran my MSP business and hosted WordPress websites on WPEngine, I quickly built and ran this blog there until a fairly substantial price-increase caused me to ponder why I might pay $600+ CAD a year to host a personal blog. Yes, WPEngine is a phenomenal host, and if your business runs a WordPress based website, I'd highly recommend you host with them. Since I no longer run my personal business, and this is a basic blog, it was time to find something cheaper, a bit more secure, reliable and FAST... Enter GhostCMS.

I did have a version of this site built in Ghost a few years back, but I didn't have time to keep my theme updated and the developer of the theme (not me) had essentially abandoned it. Now that I've found a solid theme developer who does updates on the regular, it's time to move back to a staticly generated site on GhostCMS. It's also insanely easy for me to immediately start writing blog posts with Ghost, so expect much more content to land here very soon!

Hands down one of the most musical drum solos I've ever watched. I just love how Sonny flows between the different elements (and genres) as he works his way through this solo. Amazing work from a Master drummer.

KCRW Live from The Village Studios
The sound of this performance, live from the floor at The Village Studio, is near perfect. Load this video up on your best sound system at home (or work) and give it a spin. Absolutely excellent!

Many up-and-coming cloud developers and Kubernetes enthusiasts think it’s worth their time from the get-go to dive in and get a bunch of Cloud Certifications. If you’re a junior developer, let me say that:

Certified != Qualified

I see many junior and intermediate engineers who have spent much of their time acquiring different Cloud and CNCF certifications at an early stage in their career and, while some carry more weight than others, I still want to see what skills you’ve acquired by building something useful in a cloud offering with Kubernetes.

I’ve interviewed:

• Engineers with Network certifications who can’t tell me how a load-balancer works
• Engineers with CNCF certifications that can’t tell me how to troubleshoot a broken pod
• Engineers with Azure certifications that don’t know how to secure the front-end of AKS/cloud-apps

Until an engineer has got their hands dirty building, breaking, fixing and evolving workloads in a cloud environment, they haven’t received the education or experience of the things the certifications don’t teach them. Things like nuances with different flavors of load-balancers, how to properly configure web traffic via an ingress-controller in different flavors of Kubernetes, or even how different clouds provision storage or databases for you.

If you’ve built a project that is useful, that uses a proper cloud stack, and you can Tell me a Story about that project, then I’m more inclined to listen, ask more questions and potentially (if it’s an interview situation), move you on to the next set of interviews with the team.

If you’ve already started this journey, start thinking beyond the code or immediate infrastructure:

• How might you scale this solution?
• How might CICD come into play with your application?
• What observability and alerts might you set up?
• What were some things you encountered that you didn’t see coming?
• Would you consider making the project open-source? How might you do that?

Once you have a mature app, displaying this knowledge publicly greatly helps folks like me find quality engineers with ample experience enough to join the team.

Build something cool and useful and tell me that story.

As an engineering manager, it is my job to meet, interview and hire new members to the team, gauging their abilities and alignment to the group’s culture. There are many variables across engineering teams (I manage two, very different teams) that would allow someone to become a fit for the group but I want to talk about one of the tools I use when interviewing candidates to help gauge alignment, and that is the concept of “tell me a story.”

I get many candidates who have front-loaded (read: polluted) their resumes with tools and technologies they’ve worked with or touched in their current or previous employment. There are also many candidates who have focussed their efforts on attaining Certifications from various Cloud vendors and companies in hopes that having many certificates on the wall will help them in their efforts. Note: another post is pending on this subject - Certification versus Experience, so stay tuned!

While I am interested in seeing the requisite technologies and skills related to the job posting in question, I want to know what makes the person tick. I want to know what they’re like under pressure, how they deal with difficult situations, people (or both) and some of the obstacles they’ve had to overcome in their career.

With these questions, I’m interested to see what type of learner the candidate is. Being a software engineer requires a strong ability to constantly be learning new technology and concepts to solving problems with code.

Tell me a story:

• How did you arrive at becoming a software engineer?
• Where did you study?
• What interested you in programming?
• What are you learning right now?

With these questions, I’m interested in hearing about time-management, working under pressure and how a project might have been successfully delivered. Allowing the candidate to open up about success they’ve had can lead to wonderful discussions that branch off that subject.

Tell me a story:

• Tell me about a time that you made a mistake and how you recovered from it
• Tell me about a particularly difficult outage/degradation and steps taken to mitigate the issue
• Tell me about how you might manage 3 competing priority tasks on different projects
• Tell me about a project you lead and how you designed and delivered it successfully

While I do value a breadth of technology, typically listed on a resume under the “Skills” or “Technologies” section, it’s rare that an engineer with less than 10 years experience will have the experience across the (usually massive) list of tools in these sections. I’m to the point now that when I see a resume very heavily loaded with tools/language listings and the engineer has 3-5 years experience, it’s a pass. I’ve interviewed so many of these people that when I focus on a handful of those tools/languages the response is “I know about it, but haven’t used it.” Engineers take note, don’t overload your resume with fluff or keywords to fool a resume scanner.

This is not to say that engineers with 3-5 years experience aren’t always passed over. I have hired many folks in this category based on what they’ve been through, projects they’ve delivered or passion they show for the profession. These folks were able to tell me a story about what this career has done for them, what problems they’ve solved with code and obstacles they encountered and learned from in their day-to-day.

There are other characteristics I’m watching for while candidates discuss these subjects with me. I’m watching for triggers or sore-spots related to difficult projects/tasks and how the candidate dealt with the situation. Body language is especially important and understanding what someone’s emotional intelligence is (while quite difficult to gauge) can come out when asking questions about difficult situations. Is the person being truthful? Does the story make sense? Does the story jive with the education and experience listed on the resume?

Tell me a story. You never know where it might take you and your career.

I met Jim Button while working at Critical Mass where he showed up one afternoon with flats of beer from Big Rock Brewery, where he was working as VP of Corporate and Community Affairs. I was quite involved in the Craft Beer scene during that time (2008-2009) and Jim was clearly at the centre of it. Having done a few engagements with agencies, working on the Big Rock Brewery website(s), quite often I’d find myself chatting with Jim at an event (or in the office) over a cold beverage chatting about beer or work (or both).

As the years went on, and friends migrated from agency-to-agency, I found myself hanging around the Evans Hunt Group [EHG] office, visiting with friends and former colleagues and of course, drinking cold beverages. As it turned out, Jim was working at EHG as a Marketing Strategist. More often than not, I’d find myself riding in the (very slow) elevator with none other than Jim Button. This happened more than a few times and usually ended up with Jim and I sharing a cold beverage in some quiet corner of the EHG office.

Jim was always interested to know what I was working on, what the business impact was and of course, what I’d been drinking lately. What was amazing about Jim’s “circle” was that he knew practically everyone in the craft-beer business. What I really loved about Jim was how easy it was to open up and share what was going on in your life with him. Jim was always willing to listen it felt safe to discuss pretty much anything with him. It wasn’t that Jim would have wise words or even an intelligent response, but it felt good to be able to talk about personal stuff with someone like him. He cared.

Jim eventually became a co-founder of Village Brewery and actually got me my first interview as a brewer there. It’s clear how well that interview went… but again, Jim was always willing to do the introduction and give me a chance to prove myself.

There are many communities that mourn the loss of Jim Button and the void he leaves will be felt for years to come. He did leave us with some wise words, and his final post is one of the most beautiful things I’ve read:

https://www.gatherwithjim.com/blog/2023-1-19-i-died-today

Thank-you Jim. The world is a better place because of you.

2022 was an interesting year that took me through a couple different jobs and music got me through all of it. Being a fan of rock-and-roll, I stayed true to those roots and began to (re-)discover the 80’s hair-bands. Some of the bands I’ve run through a good selection of their catalog are Tesla, Skid Row, Dokken, Great White, Cinderella and Guns’N’Roses. What’s interesting, like a lot of folks, I listened to GNR’s Appetite for Destruction so much I wore out the tape. Listening to this again reminded me how epic that album was.

With the release of the documentary on Creedence Clearwater Revival’s spectacular Royal Albert Hall show on Netflix, I was enthralled once again with the machine that is CCR and the songs that have become a part of the fabric of our culture even today. If you haven’t seen this, I highly recommend it.

Going back even further, I decided to delve into the Soul station on somafm.com. Seven Inch Soul is the rather incredible personal 45-RPM-record-collection of Dion Watts Garcia. Many bands I’ve heard on here I’ve added into my collection on Tidal including Sly and the Family Stone, Percy Sledge, The Q, and Clydie King. I usually throw this station on at night while cooking dinner and just love the vibe it brings.

Turning a corner musicially, I’ve decided to start learning to play guitar and as a result have added quite a few incredible acoustic-guitar solo artists to the playlist. One of them is Corey Heuvel who performs a rather incredible version of Over the Hills and Far Away by Led Zeppelin. His personal albums are stellar and he’s got great beginner guitar content on his Youtube channel if you’re learning like me. Another great channel I’ve discovered is Mr. Rick Beato who not only has a stellar beginner guitar series but is an incredible musician and producer himself.

2022 was also a year to check off a couple bucket-list bands from my live list. I managed to catch The Black Crowes live at Oxford Stomp (Calgary Stampede) and the band was absolutely incredible. The other bucket-list band was Styx who were mind-blowing themselves, but it helped that Nancy Wilson’s Heart opened for them which really was icing on the cake. Both were epic shows that I’m so blessed to have been able to see live.

To cap off the year, I’ve got tickets to see Big Sugar playing 2 sets as part of the 25th Anniversary of the Heated album. Really looking forward to this as they will be playing by far my favourite Big Sugar Album (Heated) cover-to-cover for the first set and some “mix” of tunes for the second set. It should be an awesome show to cap off an awesome year of music.

Holy Fire BBQ Competition team is shutting down and we’ll no longer be competing in any more competitions. I’ve made some incredible connections in the industry and will continue the smoke in my backyard for friends and family to enjoy!

When I first started smoking meat as a hobby, my goal was to eventually get good enough to enter a BBQ Competition. After much folly of feeding family and friends, practicing for my first Competition, I finally entered the BBQ on the Bow competition in 2019. This is a KCBS sanctioned event where competitors smoke brisket, chicken, pork and ribs and are judged with the KCBS guidelines.

We placed in the middle of the pack for the weekend, even winning a ribbon in the chef’s choice (pizza) that year. The next competitions we entered were in Didsbury where we didn’t do well (at all) but that’s okay. The amazing people I’ve met, become friends with, and shared epic bbq with is worth more than any ribbon. The BBQ community in Alberta is amazing and I will continue to attend (as a spectator) the BBQ competitions to cheer on the teams (and maybe sneak some brisket here or there!)

If you’re just starting out your bbq journey, I highly recommend aiming towards doing a competition, even if it’s just the backyard category. You’ll have a blast and end up meeting some amazing people, and eating some incredible BBQ!

Special thanks goes out to the teams that took us under their wing in one way or another and showed us tips and tricks!

• Redneck Kitchen - for the rib prep and fire management tips
• Notorious PIG - for the great beer, conversation and those ribs!
• BK BBQ - for the great spices
• SmellaQue - for the turn in tips and presentation 101
• Bad to the Brisket - for late night shenanigans and sharkoal!
• Motley Que - for the world’s best damn bbq sauce
• Rocky Mountain Smokers - for the morning shots and bbq leadership

I had the pleasure of attending the Oxford Stomp during the Calgary Stampede this year and was able to check off a “bucket list” band for me which was seeing The Black Crowes live in concert. One of the openers was Canadian band, Our Lady Peace.

Raine Maida (lead singer) told a story about how he, as a young teen, wanted to be “on the stage” but didn’t know how to get there. He and his girlfriend got nosebleeder seats to the Toronto Music Awards and “sat through 2-ish hours of boring.” The last band though, the show closer, played 2 songs. According to Raine, “that band, and that 10 minutes of music is why I’m on this stage today.”

That band was The Tragically Hip.

The song, Ballad of a Poet, off the 2017 release Somethingness is a tribute to Gord Downie and the band that got Raine Maida on the stage.

I’ve been thinking about Daisy a lot lately and this, fairly well known, passage popped up on my social-media. Accredited to Leigh Curtis, K9 Companion Dog Training, Port Jervis, NY. I thought this was beautiful and thought I’d share:

Old dogs don’t die, at least, not those dogs who take the biggest chunks of our hearts with them when they leave us. Those dogs are inextricably part of our souls, and they go with us wherever we are. Though we may not see them, we know they’re there because our heart is still beating; we still breathe, and those of us who have been truly touched by a good dog know our lives really started the day we met them.

Magnificent dogs don’t die. They shepherd our dreams and only allow the good ones through the gates of our consciousness. They watch over us much as they did in life, and that moment when we step just barely outside of death or disaster, it’s because they moved our feet or they stopped short in front of us as they did in life.

You see, a good dog is something only given to a few people. They are a gift from the universe and, though they’re with us only a short time, they never really leave us. They are loyalty and love perfected, and once we are graced with that sort of love we can never lose it. We merely lose sight of it for a time, and that is our fault; for how can love like that ever go away?

It can’t. It can’t, and it never will. For these brave souls trade their hearts for ours, and they beat together beyond sickness, beyond death. They are ours, and we are theirs, for every sunrise and every sunset, until the sun blazes its last and we once again join the stars.

I’ve probably watched this video 100 times. The sound, the playing, the tuning and the creativity are all just… epic. If you have good speakers or even better headphones, give this a spin. This is how I dream of my drums sounding…

As I sit here writing this watching snow fall in Calgary, a day after it was 23 degrees Celsius, I was thinking about a question a friend of mine from Vancouver Island asked me a few days back:

When are you moving back home?

I began to fall back to memories of spending summers in Parksville and Qualicum beach, running on the sand, swimming and going for ice cream with family and friends. Then I fast-forwarded to the present, where I have an amazing home, an incredible family, great friends and growing career.

What got me to thinking, Where is home? There is an incredible Ted Talk by writer Pico Iyer that I’d seen years ago and had bookmarked. I revisited this and began to reflect on some of the ideas presented there. Pico says:

Where you come from now is much less important than where you’re going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It’s the place where you become yourself.

The last sentence there, for me, is Calgary Alberta. I came to Calgary to start a career, be with friends and a (now ex-) wife who had moved to Calgary to seek their careers as well. I ended up finding an incredible wife, creating a beautiful family, meeting friends that would reshape my life and not least of all, building an amazing career.

There are experiences in my life that impacted me. Standing in Cathedral Grove on the West Coast of Vancouver Island, surrounded by 1000 year old trees in the temperate rainforest and walking on Wickaninnish beach during a storm. Walking dogs through River Park while a Chinook rolls in, blowing hot wind in your face during mid-winter. Watching my amazing children take their first steps and develop feelings and personalities. Pico Iyer says:

…I do think it’s only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. And it’s only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about and find a home. But movement, ultimately, only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to.

And home, in the end, is of course not just the place where you sleep. It’s the place where you stand.

Calgary, Alberta is home. I tried to imagine how I would feel moving my family back to Vancouver Island and I believe I would feel a profound sense of loss, leaving everything I’ve experienced here, behind. I have many family members on the island that I truly miss and will visit again someday. But for now, I will sit in my living room and watch the snow slowly fall… in the middle of April.

Sometimes a cover is so good you just HAVE to share. Scary Pockets is a funk band with a set of rotating (extremely talented) musicians that cover songs from many genres. I’ve been a huge fan of theirs on YouTube and have supported them on Patreon for a while. Not much more to say but, Enjoy!

I’ve had different dogs in my life from the time I was 18 years old. Daisy was the first of them though, that became my dog. Dogs love us unconditionally. They are always there for us no matter what the situation. Daisy was there for me through a divorce, the loss of my mother to cancer, meeting my lovely wife, Melody, and was a companion to both my children. At 17 years old, and realizing the toll the loss of hearing, sight and general health was causing Daisy, I knew it was time to let her go.

Daisy’s last day with us consisted of a long walk to visit all her “spots” around our neighbourhood and what was specifically tough about this one was how much energy she had. Lately it had been a struggle to get her around the block, but we went a figure-8 around our house 2 blocks each way. Arriving home, Daisy got to have steak for breakfast, which she devoured in almost no time.

The appointment was for 10:30am. The entire time between Daisy finishing her breakfast and the Doctor arriving at my place for the appointment, Daisy and I spent together snuggling, having treats and me repeatedly telling her she was a good girl and she was my favourite.

When the Doctor arrived, Daisy was curious to meet this new person and when I pulled Daisy back up on the couch with me, she looked at me and she knew. Daisy crawled up to me and snuggled into my arms for a last treat before the first shot to put her gently to sleep. She looked up at me, kissed my nose one last time and went to sleep. I held her in my arms and felt her last breath and heartbeat. I knew then, my good girl was gone.

In the days past, the struggle has been real. It’s very rare for me to cry and this process has broken my heart to the point that when the tears come, it’s an ugly cry. I know this is a big part of the grieving process so I let it happen because eventually I know things will get better. Perhaps the toughest thing is realizing that I’ve become conditioned to care for a 17 year old dog; always thinking I need to help carry her up the stairs from my basement office, let her out the back to do her business and ensure she has food and water each day. These things I do subconsciously and is the most painful process to amend.

I know I did the right thing. I know I will see her again. I am blessed that she got to be part of my family, meet my children and be loved by so many. Godspeed Daisy, until we meet again.