Running this site for the past 16 years has been an interesting and eventful journey. One that has reached its end.

“Wahl Network” was not the best of names, but it was picked to reflect my desire to share knowledge with others in a minimal nonsense sort of way. I feel the site has completed this task admirably. And I got to make stickers and buttons, which was fun.

My content will remain online until the end of July 2026, at which time the hosting contract ends and the site will vaporize.

All good things must come to an end. What was written here will exist in human memories and perhaps some web caches. I do not mourn the void but instead celebrate the path taken.

Thank you for reading my stuff.

✌️ & 🩵

I was hungover from a very fun murder mystery party in which I was the secret, fictitious murderer. The party was hosted by a really awesome friend, but I really didn’t know anyone else there. Facing 30 or more strangers is something very stressful for me and I have historically found alcohol to be a great social lubricant that turns me into a fun, outgoing, social teddy bear of a person.

This is not a new pattern. Pretty much my entire adult life has been a conflict between wanting to do social things, especially as a public speaker, and getting extremely anxious about social situations and meeting people for the first time. Each time, I turned to drinks to get me through it. Heck, at some points in my life this became what I was known for – the guy who could pound a lot of drinks or shots and remain upright and party-worthy until early in the morning. Plus, I never got sick and rarely suffered a hangover.

Getting Older Sucks

But that started to change in my 40s. I kept up with the same habits and patterns from my earlier days but my body was like, uh, no sir, we ain’t doing that again. I started making poor decisions at social events because my limit was significantly reduced from what I’d remember it to be. I’d feel like crap for multiple days after drinking. And at the murder mystery party, I blacked out and had to be carried to the car and driven home by my spouse after being sick.

That’s embarrassing! And it’s not fair to my partner, to the party hosts, or to the party guests who were searching for the fictitious murderer. It’s just bad all the way around.

I thought a lot about what to do. Did I really need to drink? No, I supposed not.

It’s not all that important, really, and these days it’s much more socially acceptable to abstain from drinking than when I was growing up. I mean, it used to be that not drinking at a party would brand you as an outcast and freak. People would get upset. But now days you can find non-alcoholic stuff on the menu, such as sodas and “mocktails”, with regular frequency. So, no, drinking wasn’t a mandatory thing anymore from a social perspective.

Committing to Change

On May 1st, 2025, I started my official run into prolonged sobriety. Any chemical influence besides caffeine has been banned from consumption, which these days includes CBD and THC. I don’t even take Ibuprofen or Tylenol anymore, and not because I believe all the medical fakery on the news, but because I just don’t want much of anything floating around in my bloodstream anymore.

For the first three weeks, things were extremely challenging. I wouldn’t consider myself an alcoholic or anything, but I certainly consumed and smoked a lot of various legal substances on the regular. Going cold turkey meant deep headaches, dark depression, and most of all, extremely vivid nightmares.

I had trouble sleeping and would wake up in a cold sweat, terrified, still believing that some horrible thing had happened until I was calm enough to remember that it had been a nightmare. This part sucks, but I had done enough research to realize that it was going to happen, so I was at least somewhat prepared for it and knew it was “normal.”

Then, the nightmares stopped and for the first time in literally years I had a great night’s sleep. The first three weeks were over and done! And it was like the weather outside went from dark and stormy to bright, sunny, and beautiful. Years of sludge had been processed and removed from my system.

I was just … me.

And it felt frickin’ awesome.

Staying the Course

Every morning, I write down how many days in a row I’ve remained sober on my Kurzgesagt calendar. Every evening, I check off that day to signify that I’ve completed the day successfully. I use a random whiteboard marker because that is mounted next to the calendar – the colors have no meaning.

Today will make 183 days, which is half a year. I do not have a goal number of days in mind. I’m not sure how many days I will reach. I just wake up, write another number, check off a day, and go to sleep at night.

After 1 month of sobriety, I bought this coin to put on my desk. It has a lovely picture of a tree etched on the front, and a reminder to grow strong on the back. Given my love of organic gardening, I thought this to be a relevant reminder of my journey.

When I go to social events, I put it in my pocket and bring it with me. Being able to grip the coin in my pocket gives me strength. It reminds me that I’m choosing this path. That I’m in control. It nudges me to get a water or a soda when I’m talking to friends over cocktails or dinner.

Over time, social events have become way more INTERESTING and FUN. I’m much less stressed out, much less anxious. I don’t need anything more than myself! It’s a different experience, for sure, but one that I now prefer.

Temptation

Every once in a while, especially when I’m not having the best day or feel a little bored, I’ll remember life before sobriety. It will call to me, like a gentle tug. Like a whisper, promising great things. I don’t feel this way often, but it does happen like once or twice a month. But I love my ritual with the numbers on the calendar, and I like the “BIG NUMBER GET BIGGER” feeling, so I stay the course.

The calendar ritual has become part of who I am and what I choose to do. Even when I took A Summer Road Trip I didn’t stray from the path. I just came home and updated the calendar to the current date, and continued on.

Parting Thoughts

For me, having a ritual and a physical token are enough because those things dovetail well into my personality. I know what makes me tick. 😉

It took a really low point, the murder mystery party, for me to finally clean up my shit. I think that’s normal? We need something to punch us in the face sometimes to really prioritize change. Just know that you’re not alone if you’re facing this, that other people (like myself) deal with drinking and smoking and other things as well, and that even with weeks of nightmares and withdraw symptoms to deal with, getting rid of a bad habit that is slowly killing you is WORTH IT.

I recommend everyone watch these alcohol and weed videos to learn more about the science behind these choices.

~

Peace and love, friend.

✌️ & 🩵

Water is at the heart of our civilization – where to source it, how to treat, who gets it, how much they pay for it, and how much we’re allowed to use (or at least supposed to use). Something like 3/5ths of my city’s budget goes to something water related and I’m guessing it’s not far off for most of you reading this – which is a good reminder that you can typically find your town or city’s fiscal budget online to verify.

It takes a lot of work to make clean water magically come out of your faucet. You should be curious about this. 🤔

Water is also at the heart of the data center debate. In short, all of the AI that everyone enjoys doesn’t come free. It requires the creation, operation, and maintenance of a vast army of data centers, along with the creation of a mega ton more of them. Data centers are thirsty creatures. It takes a lot of water to run all the cooling systems.

I spent decades working in data centers as an engineer – the guy you’d send to go rack and stack stuff into rows of cabinets – and can attest that the internal water pumping facilities are second only to maybe the backup generators in terms of size and priority. Here’s me sporting a Beyonce shirt (as one does) while doing some cabling in a data center in California.

I bring this up because I hear grumbling about data center proposals a lot, especially here in Texas, mainly because we’re already a drought prone area with high electricity prices and more data centers just makes it worse.

Interesting times!

OK, with that out of the way, let’s talk constructively about water usage as it relates to raising crops and all the ways I’ve goofed and learned while setting up my “micro farm” with drip irrigation lines. I think it’s important to get squeeze every dollar you can out of the water used while also tipping a hat towards water conservation.

Getting Started

I try to be a good steward to the water in my area. When I bought my home in 2022, it came fully loaded with an army of 🫗 irrigation sprinklers (small water throwers) and rotors (big water throwers) to keep about a half acre of grass alive. It’s all a bit overkill and I could really care less about wasting water on grass, but it is nice to have a system in place to distribute water.

As I continue to build out more planters to grow organic food, which requires the removal of grass (yay!), it also means having to rethink how the irrigation system works. I’m obviously not going to want water being “thrown about” needlessly by spraying against the side of my raised beds. I want the water to go directly to the roots of my crops and driplines of my fruiting trees. And my crops are going everywhere the sun shines, which is 75% or more of my land.

See the little rotor working hard below, diligently spraying the wall of a planter. 😂

That means I need to figure out how to alter a system originally designed for grass to become a hybrid, mixed-usage system for trees, planters, and a small amount of grass.

It turns out this is a non trivial problem to solve. Too much water to the crops invites blight, bacteria, disease, and rot. Too much water to the grass is just wasteful and also creates homes for mosquitos and other harmful insects. I’ve been wrestling with the re-design of the irrigation system for most of the year.

Oh, here’s some random 🌼 Gerbera Daisies, aren’t they beautiful?

I thought that perhaps some of you out there are also in a similar boat. Maybe you want to grow some food but keep your grass alive. Maybe you have an irrigation system and want to change its behavior. Heck, maybe you DON’T have an irrigation system and just want to hook up to one of your hose bibs (“the hose”) outside so that you can go on holidays without having your plants die.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far. Take it all with a grain of salt, I’m still new at this.

The Basics

Irrigation systems are pretty simple machines.

You run a length of PVC pipe underground. You attach riser assemblies (also referred to as “funny pipe” assemblies) to connect the main line to a sprinkler or rotor head. Sprinklers use a 1/2″ connection while rotors use a 3/4″ connection. The head is buried about 6″ underground with just the top peeking out and inside are some mechanical bits, a filter, and tech to prevent water backflow.

With my system, about a dozen actuator valves are located in the pipe that leads to various groups of sprinklers. Each group is a zone. When it’s time for the zone to water, a solenoid opens the valve. This is controlled by an irrigation controller, which is just a dumb electronic component with a timer and a schedule.

With the valve open, the city’s main water pressure sends water down the pipe and the water pressure builds in the target zone section of the pipe. The heads throw water based on their design. That’s kinda it. Pressure does all the work. The only electronic bit is the controller telling the valves when to open or close, and the system is designed to fail safe meaning that the solenoid naturally closes when losing power.

Converting from Sprinkler to Drip

In my back yard I covered up much of the previous lawn space with raised garden beds. For each garden bed, I stole a sprinkler head and converted it into a drip connector to directly irrigate my crops. My sprinklers are Rain Bird 1800s and my rotors are Rain Bird 5000s. Converting them requires buying a retro kit, which taps into the same riser assembly, along with a 3/4″ to 1/2″ adapter when replacing a rotor. Instead of throwing water around, however, the retro kit terminates into a 1/2″ tee or elbow connector for a drip system and only contains a water filter inside.

You’re basically ripping out all the fancy engineering from the sprinkler and stealing the water for other usage.

For digging a hole like this, don’t be an idiot like I was and use a shovel. It’s grueling work and you have a high chance of cutting the riser. Go with an edger tool or, better yet, get a Hori Hori knife. WAY EASIER. I love this knife.

I used 1/2″ flexible tubing or “distribution tubing” to get water from the retro kit to the planters. It’s worth noting that 1/2″ is not necessarily the diameter of the pipe but more of a rough estimate of size. The outer diameter, often labeled “OD” on the product, is variable. Some outer diameters are 0.63″ or 0.65″ or 0.70″. This actually matters when it comes to connecting the distribution tubing to fittings.

Fittings, such as elbows, tees, ball valves, and the like all expect a certain size tubing. If you have a fitting designed for 0.65″ tubing, but you try to force 0.70″ tubing, it’s not going to work because the dimensions are not the same across parts. In short, pick a size and make sure your tubing and fittings are designed for that size. I went with 0.65″ for all my parts across all projects.

Here’s my parts list if you need one: Elbow, End Cap, Valve, and Tee.

💡Tip: Keep a checklist with all the parts and components you’ll need, especially when going to buy them on Amazon or at your local hardware store. Since 2013, I’ve been using Todoist for task tracking and collaboration. I’ve completed over 17,000 tasks as a paying customer. 😲 I’m also a Todoist Ambassador! If you’d like to try it out for free and directly support the blog, here’s my referral link.

If you’ve ever worked with pipe or other types of tubing, distribution tubing is child’s play. No sweating like with copper. No cementing like with PVC. Everything is held together by compression and pressure. Monkey put fitting into tube, monkey get banana. And cutting distribution tubing can be done with a sharp knife or even scissors, although I prefer to use tin snips because they are comfortable, powerful, and leave a clean cut without making my hands sore.

Here we see the Plant Manager asleep on the job. AS USUAL. 🤣

Fittings use a “barb” connector, which looks like an oversized ring around the opening of the fitting. As the tubing is inserted over the fitting, the barb slightly expands the tubing and presses against it, thus forming a compression fitting. I like to use fittings that have a twist-on cap that goes over the barb. They look cleaner and are super strong. I tried to rip a tube apart from the fitting by hand and the joint held just fine. Plus, when water pressure is applied to the tubing, it just makes the joint stronger. Kinda cool.

Modular Drip Irrigation Design

Here’s where you get into the 31 flavors problem – there are infinite ways to drip water into a target crop. From directly hooking your distribution tubing into a planter and just poking holes into it, which is the first thing I experimented with (picture below), all the way to setting up “railroad ties” with 1/4″ tubing leading directly to plant roots.

I have a few opinions here.

FIRST, fall in love with ball valves. I sure have. These are quarter turn shutoff valves that you put in line of your distribution tubing. Every retro kit I’ve installed leads first to a shutoff valve because there will be times that I want to disable a planter from receiving water for maintenance, weather, or seasonal rotation.

SECOND, continue to fall in love with ball valves. Any time you setup a major artery, install a secondary shutoff valve so you can turn off the water to that artery. For example, I have a planter that is a mix of Texas all-year crops (tomatoes, peppers) and Fall weather crops (lettuce, carrots, onions). The distribution lines feeding these little guys all have shutoff valves to them. As an added bonus, the shutoff valve can also be used to control the water pressure to that line, meaning I can halfway close a valve to deliver roughly half as much pressure and thus half as much water. You don’t have to go crazy with valves here but I do like having them anywhere I might want greater control over the downstream water consumers.

Below is an early design for my first planter box. Each downstream consumer line from the manifold has a shutoff valve that controls (or terminates) flow.

THIRD, keep it modular. I tend to think of each distribution line like this: main feed, manifold, consumers.

Main Feed

The main feed is the water coming from the retro kit and is simply the shutoff valve and any fittings needed to get to the box. Below, I’ve run about 10 feet of distribution tubing to a planter box and troubleshoot the flow before burying the line 4″ in the ground. The main shutoff is at the planter to avoid having to walk all the way to the retro kit.

Manifold

The manifold is the various tees and elbows coming off the main feed in order to get water into all the downstream consumers. For most of my raised beds, I setup a manifold with 4 consumer ports. Each consumer port has a shutoff valve.

In the photo below, I learned that I could gain more stability against tubing movement by threading the consumer lines through a hole in the planter side wall and terminating an elbow fitting in the hole. I measured the manifold size to match the distance between crop rows, built the manifold as a single assembly, and then installed it into the planter wall.

Consumers

Consumers are the lines leading to my crops and trees. These should require the least amount of effort and maintenance because I don’t want to be controlling water pressure at this level of granularity if I can help it.

In the consumer line below, I’m using 8-way drip sprayers tightened down to about 3″ of throw distance to keep my green onions hydrated. These seedlings are about 5 days old. I suggest using lawn staples or wire stakes to keep the consumer line where you want it. Oh, and definitely grab a hole punch tool for inserting drippers to make the job easy and clean.

And just for fun, here’s a cute little baby spinach seedling.

Tomato and basil get 1/4″ tubing pointed right at their roots. I use a pair of 2 gallon per hour (gph) emitters for the tomatoes and one for the basil. Use the hole punch tool on the distribution line, insert the emitter, and then direct the 1/4″ tubing directly to the root zone and use a drip support stake to keep the water pointed in the right direction.

Another view of the tomato dripper.

Here’s some romaine lettuce receiving water from two different consumer lines. I keep them located in the center row of the planter for this reason. Big fellas like leaf lettuce, head lettuce, and celery take up this space.

My main feed and manifold designs are fairly consistent across planters and only really change and evolve as I form new opinions on how to do things better. But the consistency across planters is part of the design. Consistent, simple engineering is easy to copy, maintain, and troubleshoot. The consumer lines are the only things that really vary across planters because the way I water a tomato plant with spot emitters is not the same way I water lettuce, for example.

Scheduling Grass and Crops

While it would be great if my watering zones didn’t have a mixture of grass and crops in the same zone, changing this would require digging up much of my yard to install new irrigation actuators and solenoids into the main line. Maybe some day, but for now, no thank you.

I’ve tried to balance my zone watering schedule for the crops and trees. This means scheduling two deep watering sessions per week. Beyond this, I hand water the seedlings because they need daily moisture, sometimes twice a day, while they build their new root systems. Everything else for the grass has been capped.

Capping is a way to stop water from emerging from a sprinkler or rotor. You have some options here.

For sprinklers, I bought the Rain Bird caps. Remove the existing cap, screw in the cover cap, and you’ve stopped them from being sprinklers anymore. I like this. It doesn’t require me to dig into the ground and monkey with the assembly. You apparently have to buy the vendor’s cap, you can’t get a generic cap or use some other vendor’s cap from what I can tell.

For the rotors, unless you have a fancy rotor with a shutoff feature, your only option is to dig up the rotor and cap the riser assembly with a literal screw-on cap, either a 1/2″ cap for sprinklers or 3/4″ cap for rotors. In my case, I’ve stolen all the rotors to become retro kit recipients for raised beds. But I think there’s also an option B – install a retro kit into the rotor slot and then use a shutoff valve to terminate waterflow. I like this option better because it saves you a future water source if you ever need it.

Conclusion

I have such a love for irrigation. It feels a lot like building modular systems for tech, especially pipeline automation, but with something tangible and alive that gives back food in return for my efforts.

This has been fun to write. I hope you enjoyed!

✌️ & 🩵

Slop Farms

When I started this year, I had the idea of returning to the well of content creation with a focus on educational videos for technology professionals. I think I made a dozen or so videos and shorts along with a podcast. It was fun for a while, but I quickly came to dislike the grind. Setting up AWS and GitHub and VSCode and GitLab and ArgoCD is cool and all, but it isn’t very satisfying. Then you add all these tech companies cramming AI stuff into their products, with spammy advertising to upgrade your subscription to get the AI features, and it all became very not fun. Not fun at all.

I view YouTube these days and see it absolutely drenched in AI slop. At first it was mostly advertisements using slop. Videos of Elon Musk saying he wants to make 10 millionaires each day and to click a link, or of some retiring watchmaker having a sale on his vintage watches that were obviously AI generated drop-ship junk. But then it became full YouTube channels of slop, like all the “cave death” channels being narrated by AI voices with little stick figure drawings. And now I’m seeing the wave of Sora generated slop being shoved into YouTube.

I’m the type of YouTube viewer who uses his Subscriptions tab. I rarely use “the algorithm” to find things. But I do see what it recommends after viewing a video, along with sometimes looking at the home page of YouTube. And it’s recommending the slop. It’s just a big slop sandwich these days – slop content filled with slop ads with shorts feeds of more slop.

Seeing this really takes the wind out of my sails. Why would I want to make content for this environment? What even would my content be? The stuff I made earlier this year took a ton of time, energy, and money, and I don’t think people are even watching it anyway. I’m not looking to make money on YouTube and could not care less about advertisement revenue. I make about $200 a year from viewership. But if I’m going against an army of slop machines for people who are actually putting eyeballs on that garbage, I don’t feel like I have any sort of ability to succeed as a content creator. It keeps me on the sidelines.

With that said, I do have some content I’d like to make and some irons in the fire. But I’m determined to avoid using AI in the ideation, generation, curation, audio, or production of the content. People will either consume the content, or they won’t, and I’m trying to stop worrying about that part.

More Plant Stuff

I’ve been busy, but in a completely different way than what I think people mean when they say they are busy. “How’s it going?” we tend to ask one another. “Keeping busy!” is the typical reply. I think it’s a way to avoid answering and more of a social norm verbal handshake that then frees up one another to move on to the topic(s) at hand.

For me, it’s Fall planting time, and so I’ve been busy with learning just what the heck that means here in Texas. My “micro farm” has continued to grow, with another 400 square feet (about 38 square meters) of garden beds planned. This will be the new home of my tomato and pepper plants, along with many, many others that will provide food for my family.

In the 8×4′ bed shown above, I’m using 2×6″ boards for the frame, 4×4″ boards for the corner and mid supports, and cedar fence pickets (with the tops removed) for the sides. Once completed, I added a railing, sealed everything with food grade sealer, and then built a layer of limestone pavers to deter potential termites in the ground from snacking on the wood. I’m much happier with this design compared to my first bed shown in the Growing Organic Food post, but that comes with experience. I’m sure there will be further tweaks made as I build more of them.

I had a moment of clarity a few weeks back. Many of my tomato flowers were not turning into tomatoes. I made the assumption they were not being pollenated. I think the bees just have better options nearby as I have several beds with roses, sage, Purple Heart, Mums, and more that keeps their attention. So, I dropped in a dozen Gerbera Daisies in between my basil and tomato plants like a “help wanted” sign for nearby bees.

Success!

All of my tomato plants (Roma and Sun Sugar) are now fruiting like gold medal champions.

The Sun Sugar plants are absolutely laden with “string of pearl” fruits with as many as 8 cherry tomatoes per string. I ended up “topping” the vines a month or so back to discourage any further vine growth, causing the tomatoes to switch into fanatical fruit growing mode.

Here’s another picture showing the full lifecycle from flower to fruit in a single shot. The garden glove in the background is there to help my phone lens focus correctly. 😄

Growing organic food and using my expanding carpentry experience continues to feed my belly and my soul. It scratches the itch to “make things” like I did in the Cloud, but with a tangible sense of accomplishment that was missing from deploying software.

I’m very excited to finish up these new planter beds, drop in an irrigation connection to my Rachio (water system), and then start exploring methods to use IoT sensors to start trending temperature, moisture, light readings, nutrients, and more in the future.

✌️ & 🩵

I hope you, dear reader, have a lovely rest of your day.

I was surprised at how emotional this felt. Saying goodbye to the freedom of pointing towards a direction and saying “I wonder what’s over there” was more difficult than I had anticipated. So many new friends, new places, new memories, all captured by hand in a small, spiral notebook neatly organized by date and destination. I flipped back through my written notes, sketched drawings, and small mementos with a smile, thinking back to how it all began.

Road Trip Goals

About 10 years ago, I had the absolute pleasure of hanging out with my good buddy and former Datanauts co-host, Ethan Banks, as we spent days sweating through the trees and rocks in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. It remains one of the best experiences in my life.

We wanted to reunite for something similar and cross a few more Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC) huts off my list. This presented me with an awesome opportunity to take a road trip instead of flying.

The road trip idea appealed to me because I’m self-employed and my own boss, so there’s no one demanding that I fill out a time card, submit a PTO request, or be back within any sort of timeframe. My garden is pretty much on auto pilot for the remainder of Summer, requiring only minor bits of attention from my lovely wife while I was out. I also wanted to try out a bunch of road trip equipment – coolers, containers, snacks, organizers, hotel booking apps, etc. – and see which ones I liked best for future road trips.

And thus I designed a road trip to take me from Texas to New Hampshire to North Carolina and back home to Texas! Or, more specifically, TX ➡️ AR ➡️ TN ➡️ KY ➡️ OH ➡️ PA ➡️ NY ➡️ VT ➡️ NH ➡️ MA ➡️ CT ➡️ PA ➡️ DE ➡️ MD ➡️ VA ➡️ NC ➡️ GA ➡️ AL ➡️ MS ➡️ LA ➡️ TX.

Equipment, Coolers, and Containers

My main bag was a Maelstrom Collapsible Soft Cooler Bag that zips up and has some handy pockets on the side along with a shoulder strap. This is my primary bulk storage cooler that lives in the back of the car and ideally only gets opened 1 or 2 times per day to stay frosty. I used a set of 4 Large Leakproof Ice Bags to cool off the contents.

After about 6 days of this setup, I got tired of having to cycle through ice from hotel ice machines and grocery store ice chests. It was a big pain in the ass.

I upgraded to a 53 Quart Dual Zone Freezer Compressor Cooler that I had shipped to where I was staying from Amazon and started using the Maelstrom bag just for empty bottle storage in between doing dishes. Night and day difference, I LOVE the electric cooler.

The cooler connects to a standard 12V power adapter (formerly known as a cigarette lighter) or standard wall socket outlet. My Subaru Outback has a 12V power plug in the back, making it easy to keep the freezer powered during transit. There’s also a Bluetooth phone app for the freezer so you can check on your temperatures or even adjust them without having to pull over and pop open the trunk. In a world of stupid phone apps, this one actually felt useful.

Inside this, I placed 12 Sursip 18oz Glass Reusable Drinking Bottles filled with home made tea and cold brew coffee (6 of each) to avoid needing to stop each day for beverages. Coffee places, especially Starbucks, are horribly overpriced. I filled 108oz worth of coffee bottles for less than $5 and planned to restock at grocery stores along my route. I chose glass because I generally prefer to avoid using plastics to store my food and drink items. To help protect the glass, I used Silicone Glass Water Bottle Sleeves.

I prefer to bring my own water that is filtered and not from a plastic bottle. For this, I chose a trio of 1 Gallon Insulated Stainless Steel Water Jugs. They have a big screw top that is easy to secure, along with a screw on spout cap for filling a water bottle or drinking directly from the jug. The bottoms have a rubber grip so they don’t slide around. There’s also a shoulder strap that connects to a carrying bag with zip-up pockets.

My daily cooler was an Arctic Zone Titan Zipperless Soft Cooler. I filled this up each morning with a coffee bottle, a tea bottle, and some home made snacks of granola, almonds, and raisins. It could fit these three items with room for an ice pack that I already owned. The soft cooler and 1 of the water jugs rode shotgun on my passenger seat for easy access. :)

Lastly, I picked up a Large Trunk Organizer With Built-in Leakproof Cooler Bag and place it into the back seats. It was handy for the various bits and pieces that I wanted to be able to grab by reaching behind me. Things like extra hats, bulk snack jars, my extra water jugs, a bunch of books to read, a pair of sandals, and so forth. Way nicer than having things slide around on the seats, and I could tuck my windshield sun visor behind the organizer when driving.

Lodging

We all need a place to sleep each night!

For me, each day I had three options:

1. Crash at a friend’s house. I did this for about half of my total nights and am extremely grateful to everyone who put up with me! Pro tip – buy your host(s) a meal or something else to say thank you.
2. Use the Hilton app with the digital key feature, sorted by the cheapest price (I tried to keep it around $100 a night). Digital key means no need to visit the front desk to check in, which is AWESOME. You just select a room, walk to that room, tell the app to open your room door, and you’re done. Great after a long day of driving.
3. Use the Hotels dot com app for more boutique stays, which I did while in Manteo, NC. Sometimes you want something a little nicer or different than a cookie cutter national chain hotel.

These are my personal choices. You do you, boo.

Driving to New Hampshire

In Europe, many of my friends take a large chunk of time for “holidays” (we know this as vacation in the US) during the Summer. I’ve rarely taken a week off, much less 2 or more weeks. I was curious – what is it like to take off an entire month and go have fun?

I had coffee and some of the best ever pizza slices with an engineering team in Arkansas! Fork and knife for scale. Pro tip – don’t mess with an Arkansas State Trooper, they are the ultimate badasses.

I visited a bunch of rest stops that contained historical markers across Tennessee, although I think this is the state I enjoyed driving through the least! I ended up taking a rest break and reading about Fort Johnson.

Hello, Kentucky! Is it even a road trip without a stop at Buc-ee’s? I’d argue not 😁 I enjoyed driving along The Bluegrass Parkway (Kentucky Route 9002) and seeing signs for all the distilleries.

I held open the door for elderly folks taking a break at a service station in New York (State), and chatted them up a bit about their Illinois license plates – turns out we used to live only a few towns away from each other! New York state really wants you to download their app.

Lastly, I marveled at the massive amount of advertisements for marijuana dispensaries as I drove through Vermont; they are everywhere! (I don’t partake). Sorry, no photos, I was on some really windy back roads and didn’t end up stopping to take a picture.

The White Mountains (NH)

A little over 2000 miles and 5 days later, I was at my destination. Could I have made the trip in less time? Sure. But that sounds painful and no fun compared to a more leisurely drive with stops to see friends and scenery. I would often stop for no other reason than to stretch my legs, walk around a city for half an hour, and even read a chapter or two of a book.

The mountains were beautiful and I greatly enjoyed several days of hiking over rocks, eating tasty local foods, and having rich conversation about life, the universe, and everything with friends. If you have not yet visited New Hampshire, I highly recommend it! It’s a state that thrives on tourism, filled with the most beautiful and scenic natural spaces this great country has to offer. Although my Texan ass was cold most of the time because it gets down to like 11C at night (bring pants!). 🤣

Driving to the Outer Banks (NC)

I grew up along the beaches of North Carolina and spent time in the Outer Banks (OBX) as a kid. It felt like a good idea to go visit them again as an adult!

This was right around the time that Hurricane Erin was doing a salsa dance off the Atlantic. Fortunately, it blew East and never really did much to North Carolina, which was awesome because it meant the weather would be gorgeous (as it usually is after a hurricane hits).

I made a stop in Delaware to live the scene from Wayne’s World. “Or, imagine being magically whisked away to… Delaware.”

Although, truth be told, the rest stop was gorgeous with a fountain featuring a riot of marigolds and other flowers blooming that smelled amazing.

Crossing the Chesapeake Bay was a $21 adventure that I’m glad I saw. There’s like 10 miles of bridge and tunnels to experience so I drove slow and soaked it up.

Manteo (NC)

I spent a long weekend in the city of Manteo, located on Roanoke Island. It’s a beautiful place with several historic sites and away from the more touristy parts of the OBX. I made sure to capture a few sunrises with the photo below being my favorite. The Atlantic waters are so much warmer and calmer than anything you’ll find out west in the Pacific.

Manteo is a bit of sleepy town in the mornings, although I did manage to find a Saturday market with a bunch of locals selling hand made goods. It was fun to go around chatting them all up to ask about how long they had been making their goods (hammocks, candles, wood crafts, flags, etc.). The “Carolina Drawl” is like hearing the sweetness of honey and is more, I guess, “vowely” than what you hear down in Texas.

I ate at lots of local places and try hard to be healthy in my food choices, but I had to pour one out for my old favorite, Bojangles! We don’t have them here in Texas for the most part (there’s a few by Dallas but I tried them and they taste gross). Nothing tastes better for breakfast, in my opinion, than a Cajun fillet biscuit with some seasoned fries. I feel like this meal contains 90% of your daily salt requirements! ;)

Cherokee (NC)

Upon departing Manteo, I stopped in Cherokee for a night to explore US Route 19 on my way back to Texas. Here, I discovered Soco Falls and the vista overlook you see below. This goes to show that sometimes you just need to ignore the GPS and go find things that look interesting along the route itself. Use your eyeballs!

Descending the river, what are we going to find?

Why hello there, waterfall!

Back Home

It’s great to be back home and spend some time writing this post. I’m glad that I took down notes and drew sketches from each day of my travels. I’ve re-read the entries a few times, and shared them with my spouse, to help reinforce the lessons I learned from the trip and hold on to the magic of discovery.

After being off my computer for so long – I didn’t bring anything digital with me beyond my cell phone – I’ve noticed a significant reduction in my desire to get back on the computer. Aside from writing this, I’ve been energized into finding more experiences near to home. To “be a tourist in your own city” as they say. I appreciate what I have here, both in terms of natural places to visit and my life as a whole. The trip has given me a much more humble and grateful perspective on life, which was my hope all along.

If life gives you the opportunity to take a road trip, even if it’s alone like mine was, I’d suggest taking it. Get out there and go see stuff. Do it on the cheap. Take roads you’ve not taken before to lesser known destinations. Talk to people and ask them about what they do. It’s remarkably fulfilling and fun!

✌️ & 💙

Given that I know nothing about growing food beyond tidbits of wisdom from tending a family garden as a child, I decided that 2025 would be my season(s) of experimentation. Using the same approach I discussed in Platform Engineering is Product Design at Scale, I knew a prototype would be useful in turning mountains of “things I read or watch on YouTube” into practical experience.

My end goal is to gain enough wisdom, insight, failure, and opinions to transform a large part of my lawn (grass) into an urban food farm.

This is my story so far.

Building a DIY Raised Bed Planter

I needed a place to start. A small, 4′ x 8′ planter seemed like the right size to perform my initial experiments. I didn’t want to build some massive garden only to find out that I had done it wrong and needed to move things around. Start small, learn from the experience, then scale it out.

There are many raised bed options available, from pre-made metal raised bed planters that cost hundreds of dollars and have all sorts of irrigation options built into them to DIY projects. Being that I’m in USDA Plant Hardiness Zone 8b (this helps you understand temperature minimums and freezing likeliness) I figured metal planters might get a bit scorched from direct sun and cook the soil touching the metal. Also, using a minimal amount of water and money are important to me

So, I opted for DIY!

I chose a stack of 8′ pressure treated, ground contact rated pine boards sealed with a food-grade, plant based sealer for the sides of the planter. This should give me a good 5 – 10 years of life on the wood, or maybe longer, without any worries. By then I figure I’ll have moved on to some other design anyway.

I used concrete blocks for the corners (a few bucks each). They are formed with slots for the boards on all 4 sides, and have a small, 3/8″ hole in the center that can be used for a rebar anchor.

Just level, dig, clear, and drop! I also hammered a 6′ long section of rebar into each stack of blocks to make sure they weren’t going anywhere. 😉

Once I finished building the planter, which was only a few hours of work, I filled it up half way with “browns”. These are carbon pieces like old wood, leaves, sticks, and cardboard pieces like cut up boxes (mostly from Amazon deliveries) and drink carriers that don’t have ink, tape, or other pollutants in them. I also stuck a 6′ fence post on each side to act as a trellis using the Florida-weave method (more on that later).

The remaining layer was a mix of compost, sand (for aeration), and “black tea” (worm castings).

Learning to Grow Tomatoes

What to grow? How about tomatoes! My wife and I use a ton of them every week, so it felt like a smart thing to grow ourselves. But WOW did I pick one of the harder fruits to grow without even knowing it. 😜

I purchased seedling tomatoes from our local nursery and potted them to mature while I was working on the planter. I wanted to try out both determinate and indeterminate tomatoes, which basically mean bushy/small (you can easily “determine” what the plant will look like) and vine/long varieties (the end result is “indeterminate“, it grows as vine anywhere it can, up to 9′ or more!), respectively.

For the determinate, I went with Roma tomatoes for cooking, and for the indeterminate I went with Sun Sugar tomatoes for eating off the vine as a snack or using in salads.

Below is a Sun Sugar plant in his temporary home. Tomatoes love 🌞 sun and need relatively dry soil (they are anaerobic soil lovers and use the air in soil to regulate their nutrient flow). I trimmed off some dead palm tree fronds to act as a small stake to give the vine something to climb on.

Before planting, I conditioned a set of Olla pots. These are unglazed clay pots with a cork stopper that you bury up to the neck in soil. It’s best to soak them for a day or two first to drive out all the air pockets and dust. They act as submerged water reservoirs that the plant roots can wrap around for moisture (like sipping a cup with a straw) without all the down sides of wet roots (bacteria!) or evaporation from the sun. (In the future, I’ll get bigger ones – these need to be refilled every 2-3 days.)

I used marigolds and sweet basil as “companion plants” to help camouflage my fruit producers from pests. They produce a strong smell that helps mask and shade the tomatoes, and attract good bugs that eat bad bugs – I consider this “organic automation” because you’re using Nature to control Nature, rather than pesticides or other chemicals and plastics that should not be in your food!

I topped everything with a bit of local hardwood mulch. (In the future, I plan to add 3x – 4x more companion plants than what you see below. This is way too few! Lesson learned).

The Florida-weave is a trellis technique that is great for airflow. You 2 tie wires or ropes to your fence post on one side every 6″ – 12″, then “weave” them on both sides of each plant and secure them to the fence post on the other side. Alternate between each plant. This gently secures the plant in an upright position, keeps the leaves dry and away from the soil, and allows for a good amount of air flow. (I plan to try other trellis methods in the future, such as a hanging rope trellis and cages for the determinate tomatoes, but thought this was a good method to try for the first season).

Happy tomatoes grow like a weed. I added a new set of trellis lines every week during Spring.

For example, this is how one of the Sun Sugar plants looked like in early April:

Same Sun Sugar plant, a month later in early May:

The Great Hail Disaster

Towards the end of May I suffered a major setback in the form of 3″ – 4″ sized hail stones. This was a freak storm that we don’t normally see where I live.

The delicate plants were ripped to shreds and I lost my entire crop of developing tomato fruits.

Half of the marigolds died and all of the tomato plants had major wounds all along their branches and vines. I removed a few pounds of ice from the planter in order to take the photo below.

I can’t really convey how devastating this was. I was emotionally attached to these little guys. I woke up every day for months measuring them, recording notes, taking photos, measuring soil temperature and moisture, and eagerly awaiting my first tomato.

Seeing all this work killed (literally) was depressing. 😢

But, hey, that’s life. And that’s Nature. She’s brutal and heartless but also beautiful and wonderous.

I cleaned up the planter. I pruned away following the “3 Ds” – remove anything that is Dead, Diseased, or Damaged.

Most Companion Plants Return

The first plants to really come back were the sweet basil.

With there being 4 of them planted, there’s far too much for my family to eat. And I wanted them to grow and flower to help attract more pollinators (I love 🐝 bees!).

In about a month, or in late June, they looked like the photo below and were about 2′ tall and beginning to grow flower stalks on the top. (Note that normally you don’t want your sweet basil to flower, it makes the basil leaves taste more on the bitter side. If you’re growing sweet basil to eat, split it every “2nd knuckle” on the branch and keep it from flowering).

The second plant to show signs of life were the Marigolds. These are African Marigolds (Tagetes Erecta) and have such a lovely “pom pom” flower to them. They are far smaller than they should be in this time of the year due to the hail storm, but striving to grow bigger each day. They smell very sweet.

But what about the tomatoes?

Some Tomato Plants Return

I removed all of the plant wire and replaced it with 1/4″ hemp rope and started my Florida-weave trellis from scratch.

For the Sun Sugar (indeterminate, cherry tomato) vines, I chopped most of them back to prune away all the damaged vines. They had welts and big slashes across them from the sharp ice. This took months to heal.

I’m happy to say that one of the vines has started to produce fruit again. The vine grows tomatoes in a “string of pearls” configuration, where a branch grows covered in sequential flowers that, when pollinated, turn into these little beautiful tomatoes.

Sun Sugar tomatoes turn a golden yellow as they ripen, not red as you might be familiar with from other varieties. They taste AMAZING – sort of sweet, but definitely like a tomato, with a juicy “pop” as you bite into them.

For the Roma (determinate, bushy plants), I have 1 producing so far with the other one flowering and gaining in size. I must say, these tomato plants sure are hardy! The difficult thing about Roma tomatoes, or really any “larger” tomato that isn’t tiny like a cherry tomato, is their tendency to split. Tomato plants need an entirely different water schedule when they are fruiting – too little water and they don’t bear much in the way of fruit, too much water and the tomato fruit gets pumped full of water and split apart.

Worth It

Tasting my first Sun Sugar cherry tomato was euphoric and I can’t wait to harvest the Roma tomatoes.

So much hard work, failure, and learning to make just a handful of little bites of food. I never thought it would be this hard. I never thought about all the work that goes into our food before. But now I have such a deep appreciation for organic food. Now when I see fruits and vegetables at the farmer’s market, I see them with a different set of eyes.

I see the produce as a form of love, care, and attention that it takes for someone to do this kind of labor.

And when I see quality produce, I’m like “Hey! Tell me how you did this! What is your secret?” Because it’s HARD! 😁

Conclusion

So, there you go, that’s my story and one of the things I’ve been up to this year. I’ve fallen in love with organic gardening and creating food. I’ve learned a treasure trove of things about growing food, suffered a major defeat, and went down a redemption arc of regrowth and rejuvenation.

I now have those experiences and opinions I was seeking and have all sorts of ideas of what I’m going to do next to expand beyond this little prototype and into scaling out my food production. I want to grow a ton of different types of food – lettuce, squash, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, onions, more basil varieties, and more – and expand my operations to include a large, DIY green house.

I hope you enjoyed this tale.

If there’s a moral to this story, it would be this: Sometimes you’re up, and then you’re down, and then the only thing to do next is clean up the mess and try again.

Peace

✌️&💙

This affords me a fair amount of free time that I spend reading. I’m going back through The Expanse (currently on book 7, Persepolis Rising) for fun, Paddle Your Own Canoe for self reflection, and Nine Lies About Work to stay connected with the grind. I refuse to pickup a subscription to Netflix or any other streaming platforms because I view them as brain rot.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a few shows that I miss. However, I can just pick those up on physical media (such as books). Inspiration for the Subscriptions Gone Wild and The Meteoric Rise of Online Platforms episodes of Thoughtfully Critical stemmed from these decisions.

Chasing Inspiration

All of this summates into a new brain state, one that has taken months to comfortably adopt. I refuse to turn to digital pacifiers the way I used to. I strive to feel inspiration again, a feeling that is easy to drown out via doom scrolling, constant digital inputs, or anything in between.

A close friend of mine told me:

Boredom leads to amazing things like self reflection and imagination, but also sometimes scary things like regrets; sort of like your tongue probing at a loose tooth. I realize now that boredom is a delicious luxury. If I complained about boredom as a child – “I’m bored! I have nothing to do!” – I was either assigned chores to do or told to go outside and play, which meant finding my friends to ride bikes and imagine our nearby woods to be an alien planet. As an adult, I realize the wisdom of this direction and am again leveraging it.

Storytelling Sparks

For most of the 2010’s, I told stories at events and conferences. I’d come up with an idea, typically based on problems I encountered and then solved, put the details into a slide deck, and then shop around to see what speaking opportunities were around. This model served me well! My success was predicated on this model and it afforded me many fantastic opportunities.

The difference today is that I don’t really want to travel and I dislike virtual events. Plus, modern in-person events tend to make me want to 🤢 puke from all the marketing drivel and swag seekers. I don’t want to be awash in a sea of thousands of people, I don’t want to be contacted about products, and I don’t want your t-shirt. But I do absolutely love public speaking to an audience – there is nothing on Earth like it.

I’m channeling this into the podcast with episodes like DevOps in the Modern Era, Building Better, Stronger Systems, and The Strategic Imperative of CI/CD (releases on June 8th). I spend weeks researching, coming up with slides (I make them by hand!), recording, editing, and self-publishing. It’s a good way to channel boredom into sparks of curiosity, answer questions that I myself have, and tell tales from the past.

Interesting Links

The fun stuff.

For those curious about just How Much Money Has Rick Astley Made From Rickrolling?

I’m certainly seeing a lot of boomerang hiring, and apparently ADP is, too. Interesting that so much boomerang-ing is happening in tech.

My friend Ethan shared a fantastic blog post from Thomas Ptacek titled My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts. “Do you like fine Japanese woodworking? All hand tools and sashimono joinery? Me too. Do it on your own time.” hit me hard. I’m strongly of the opinion that AI is going to blow away a large swath of existing job roles across every industry that exists. As a former consultant I could see the writing on the wall and I decided to exit on my own terms – there’s lot of buggy whip makers and users out there, folks, and the horse is once again going away.

One of the most evil companies on the planet says they will sell you ads that you can then pay them to place on their ad platform. No thanks, not now, not ever!

Rational Animations released a video titled When will AI automate all mental work, and how fast? The answer: pretty darn fast. As quoted by the infamous Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park, “Hold on to your butts!“

For my IT help desk folks.

More AI dooming, Behind the Curtain: A white-collar bloodbath. This is obviously a biased article, but I don’t think he’s entirely wrong, either.

One of the best farming videos I’ve seen to date, with an actual farmer and actual farm equipment. If you aren’t supporting your agricultural sectors, wake the f–k up; food is kinda an important thing we all need, like, every day.

For those with frienemies at work, Atlassian offers some ideas on how to diffuse the situation or, if that doesn’t work, build stronger walls.

Code Bullet is hit or miss, but his Minesweeper video tickled an itch that I had since childhood. I also find it hilarious that he never builds a kill switch into his code and often has to reboot his PC. 🤣

People are increasingly using the Internet to learn how to mop a floor or hang a picture. Shame on their parents? Shame on our society? Both? I can’t help but feel future generations are cooked.

Windows 95 is dead, long live Windows 95.

✌️ & 💙

Not just the trendy term you hear thrown around, but the real deal: its history, how it’s changed, and my perspective on where we are now.

Remembering the Early Days

In the early days, the focus was largely on breaking down silos between development and operations teams. The goal was to increase delivery velocity, improve reliability, and foster shared ownership.

The standard operating procedure up to this point was that devs would create something, hand over a really poorly documented runbook (if we got any documentation at all) on how to install it, and then expected the pile of duct tape that ran in the dev environment to magically work in production. Typically on a Friday afternoon with no heads up. I managed massive server farms that worked this way, requiring equally massive heroics from the ops team to get a service up and running (or limping along).

It sucked for everyone, especially the customer.

We saw the rise of tools that helped with these problems, like Git for version control, Jenkins for continuous integration, Docker for containerization, and tools like Puppet and Ansible for configuration management. Monitoring solutions like Nagios were around to keep an eye on things. It was about automating manual tasks and getting teams to talk to each other, maybe even over 🍕 pizza. Automation was a must-have skill, along with process knowledge and soft skills like collaboration.

But if you think DevOps is just about automating a few things, you’re missing the bigger picture.

It’s evolved into a seriously sophisticated discipline, and understanding that evolution is key.

Before DevOps, There Was Pizza

📖 Story time! In 2011, I took on a role as a network operations manager for a small group of IT professionals at a small startup that was rapidly growing. This is the same team I wrote about in A Story About Dale Furbur, a Really Good Dude.

The startup company that hired me had pretty typical issues for that period of time – a rapidly growing client base, massive hiring internally, and a dev team that physically sat in an entirely different part of the building in isolation from my team. The dev environment was an old, piece of crap server sitting under someone’s desk. Release code was painful, slow, and extremely silo filled.

Testing? Haha! No, that’s what production was for. 😉

Devs want to move fast and release code that is used by clients. It’s their dopamine hit. And I just wanted servers and storage arrays that weren’t always falling over into death spirals. But how does one make that desire a reality?

My first step was simple: get everyone talking. It’s hard to fix things when you can’t feel the pain, and I wanted both sides to better understand the pain of one another.

But how do you get two teams that have some bad blood between them to talk? The answer: pizza.

I found that our local pizza shop, Sarpino’s Pizza, offered deluxe pizza coupons that easily feed 2 people for cheap with unlimited coupon usage. I sent an email to the developers and operators with a sign up sheet – find a buddy, pick a pizza and toppings, then drop by my office with a few bucks and I’d order the pies for a Friday lunch hangout. Who could say no to a hot, delicious, high quality pizza for like 4 bucks?

The first pizza hangout drew over a dozen participants from both teams. People who worked in the same building but never met each other or knew each other’s names were finally in the same spot together sharing a meal.

There’s something special about having a meal together – it scratches at what makes us HUMAN.

And it was fun! 🙂

We swapped stories and realized how similar our situations were and how much we wanted to see our startup grow and prosper. Over time, the Friday Pizzas became legendary throughout the dev and operations teams, and we ended up taking over a large part of the cafeteria.

To this day, I am still friends with several of those folks from over 14 years ago.

Now that we actually knew each other and started TALKING, which is the “Culture” in CALMS, things started to rapidly change. When problems arose, we’d huddle together as one team, educate each other on the situation, and brainstorm ideas. My team learned all about environments, release processes, version control, and how the code worked. And because of that, we could rapidly MAKE EVERYTHING BETTER.

Now days we call much of that “DevOps.”

At the time, it just felt like common sense.

It All Changed with Cloud-Native Architectures

But fast forward to around 2019, and things really started to shift.

What began as improving collaboration and basic pipelines transformed into something demanding much deeper technical expertise. The biggest driver? The dramatic rise in system complexity, largely fueled by the widespread adoption of cloud-native architectures.

We moved from monolithic applications running on premises to distributed, microservice based applications in the cloud.

Technologies like containers and Kubernetes went from emerging trends to core components. This brought awesome benefits like increased scalability and resilience, but also significant complexity in managing these distributed systems.

The Onion Deepens

This is where the “deeper layers” of modern DevOps come in. It’s not just about basic CI/CD anymore. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) became table stakes, automation maturity went beyond simple pipelines, and security shifted left with DevSecOps. We moved from just monitoring infrastructure to needing end to end observability. And crucially, folks in DevOps needed to speak the language of software development.

Today’s DevOps professional has a wide range of responsibilities. They’re designing and building CI/CD pipelines, implementing and managing IaC, handling containerization and orchestration, integrating security, managing observability, automating operations, and managing cloud infrastructure. This requires domain expertise that is both wide and deep across areas like application and platform architecture, networking, branching strategies, building test environments, CI/CD pipelines, container architecture, tool building, and even cost controls.

I started talking about this upcoming shift in 2014 with my Stop Being a Minesweeper presentation while in the UK. I later experienced this shift first hand as a Delivery Director at Slalom, much of it discussed in my 2024 Forging a New Path to Equitable Justice – Platform Engineering for State Government presentation at both PlatformCon and DevOpsDays.

If you’re still living in the pre-2019 world, it’s time to pop your head up and stop ranting on your soap box about DevOps being a culture shift. Sure, you’re not wrong, but that time is behind us.

Summary

Ultimately, DevOps has evolved from a cultural movement aimed at breaking down silos into a technically sophisticated discipline. Like it or not, it’s essential for navigating the complexities of modern, cloud native software delivery.

What began as a cultural and procedural movement to dismantle the walls between Development and Operations … has evolved into a technically sophisticated discipline essential for managing the complexities of modern, cloud-native software delivery.

DevOps isn’t dead. But it has evolved.

You should, too.

(I’ve specifically omitted discussing AI in this post because there’s already enough slop on the Internet about it)

✌️& 💙

What’s New?

YouTube recently hit 9,500+ subscribers – yay! 😊 The push to 10,000 continues. 🙏

I’m happy to share that the first chapter of The Essentials Series courses are published, focusing on an AWS landing zone along with awesome quality of life boosts for systems engineers.

• Getting Started with AWS Cloud and Terraform
• Create a Beautiful Terminal for Windows
• GitHub Actions with AWS and OIDC Integration
• Boost Your Git Workflow with Pre-Commit Hooks

Additionally, I have 2 new podcast episodes with thoughts and rants on system things. 😉

• Three Essential Habits from a Systems Perspective
• The Truth About System Maintenance Everyone Ignores

Ask the Author: ArgoCD

👉 Have a question for me? Hit up my Questions Inbox or message me on LinkedIn and I’ll address it in an upcoming newsletter issue! You’ll also get a shout-out. 😊

This question comes Martin, asking:

What makes you a big fan of ArgoCD?

Great question! In Platform Truths, I hint a bit on my desire to both keep your Terraform / IaC code limited in scope and scale and embrace Helm charts & ArgoCD applications. This came from the pain of learning. 😁

Early on, I treated everything as a Terraform problem. That led to messy state management and conflicts with domain teams. Not everyone wants to wrestle with Terraform, and I get that. My course correction? Learning alternative models! And that’s how I found GitOps and ultimately ArgoCD.

I think the superpower of GitOps is the ability to abstract a giant swath of “we don’t care about this” parts of the application stack away. Configuration becomes something you deploy. It’s not the universal answer to all things, but there are many use cases that fit well with this model. ArgoCD is nice because it is designed for the GitOps model, understands what is going on, and allows you to tightly control what happens to the deployment when a configuration changes without having to wait around for a CI/CD pipeline.

Git as the Authoritative Single Source of Truth

With GitOps, your Git repository becomes the undisputed, central source of truth. It declaratively defines the entire desired state for your service, including application configurations, Kubernetes manifests, and environment-specific settings, all version-controlled in one place. You no longer guess what should be running; you look at Git.

ArgoCD then operationalizes this truth. It continuously monitors the specified Git repository paths and automatically ensures the live cluster state converges to match the configuration defined in Git, handling the complexities of applying changes, pruning old resources, or managing sync phases and approvals according to your predefined rules.

Repeatable and Consistent Deployments via Automation

GitOps driven by ArgoCD delivers highly consistent and reliable deployments. By automating the synchronization between the Git source of truth and the live cluster state, ArgoCD acts to reduce manual interventions. This minimizes the potential for human error and actively prevents configuration drift by continuously reconciling the cluster against the desired state defined in Git.

ArgoCD ensures this consistency isn’t limited to a single environment; it natively supports deploying applications uniformly across multiple clusters and integrates seamlessly with various templating tools like Helm and Kustomize, applying your desired state faithfully regardless of the underlying complexity.

(And yes, this often means managing more declarative YAML, but consistency is usually worth it!) 😂

Transparent and Immutable Audit Trail via Git History

GitOps inherently provides a transparent audit trail for every intended change to your applications and infrastructure configuration. Because every modification to the desired state must be captured as a commit in the Git repository, you automatically gain a complete, immutable history. This log details precisely what changed, who proposed and approved the change (via Git authorship and potential PRs), when it occurred, and ideally why (via commit messages).

This level of built-in traceability is invaluable for compliance requirements, security reviews, and forensic analysis during incident response. ArgoCD relies on this Git history, ensuring its actions correspond directly to this auditable record and making it simple to understand the sequence of events leading to the current deployed state.

Accelerated Recovery and Enhanced Resilience

GitOps practices implemented with ArgoCD improve both the speed of recovery from failures and the overall resilience of your system. If a newly deployed change introduces errors, reverting is exceptionally fast and straightforward: simply trigger a rollback to a previous, known-good commit in your Git history. Leveraging this version-controlled source of truth, ArgoCD reliably synchronizes the cluster back to the desired state defined by that earlier commit, significantly reducing Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR).

Beyond deployment rollbacks, ArgoCD actively safeguards against configuration drift. It constantly monitors the live cluster state, automatically detecting any deviations from the Git definition caused by manual changes or external factors. ArgoCD can then be configured to automatically revert these unauthorized modifications, ensuring the cluster consistently adheres to its intended state and maintaining operational integrity and compliance.

Improved Collaboration, Governance, and Operational Visibility

GitOps practices facilitated by ArgoCD enhance team collaboration and provide strong governance and operational insight. By standardizing changes through Git workflows like PRs (Pull Requests), teams benefit from inherent peer reviews, automated validation checks, and explicit approval processes before any configuration changes are merged and deployed, promoting safer and higher-quality releases. ArgoCD further strengthens control with granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and multi-tenancy features, ensuring secure access and operational boundaries suitable for large organizations and complex multi-team environments.

Critically, ArgoCD offers exceptional real-time visibility through its comprehensive web UI, clearly displaying application sync status, health metrics, deployment history, and live vs. desired state differences, which significantly simplifies monitoring, troubleshooting, and understanding the current state of deployed services. I’m a big fan of the UI!

Early Adventures in Urban Farming

I suppose we all handle a mid-life crisis differently, and mine seems to be coming in the form of urban farming. 🤣 Jokes aside, a component of wanting to become self-employed was to free up time to lean into the idea of self-reliance and less dependency on “the grid” in an urban neighborhood.

Why? Primarily because I think lawns are useless with a negative impact on biodiversity and starves your good insects (bees, dragonflies, butterflies) of nutrition. But also because grocery prices are going up, grocery quality seems to be going down, and it doesn’t take much land to produce food for a family.

I’m starting slow. Austin is hardiness zone 8b and supports a number of sun loving plants that produce lots of tasty food and can quickly bounce back from the winter freezes or just be re-planted from seed or a local nursery.

We Begin with Tomatoes

Given my love for tomatoes, I’m trying out an indeterminate (vining) tomato called Sun Sugar, and a determinate (bushing) tomato called Salsa Roma. The stakes are pruned palm tree fronds.

Our little tomato friends are in pots to test out the best spots to build out their future beds. I’ll be building raised planters with a Florida weave trellis because I find that method simple and beautiful, along with olla pots to regulate moisture.

The tomatoes will be joined by basil and marigolds to help with pests. Basil has traditionally done well for me here. I have a ton of other herbs and pepper plants but none of them look all that interesting just yet.

Each season I’ll add new experiments and continue forward with successful combinations.

Interesting Links

Here are some fun, interesting, and educational links that I’ve gathered to share with you.

The Good Work folks ask “What does Palantir actually do?“

I only recently realized that Microsoft Office has a virtual whiteboard.

Reader Will shares the open source project Pike, which is “a tool to determine the minimum permissions required to run a TF/IAC run.” Time to try this with some of my Terraform modules! More soon.

The folks at Veritasium did an amazing job going deep into the Ingenuity Mars helicopter, how it became a thing, the budget around it, and all of the missions it flew on Mars.

I enjoyed this Einzelgänger video titled The More You Resist, The Worse It Gets. Scratch that inner Taoist itch with this one.

Curious about dictators and how they rise (and remain) in power? The folks at Wired did a Tech Support video with professor and authoritarianism scholar Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Superb content, level up your education with this one.

That’s it for this issue! Let’s talk again soon. ✌️& 💙

Like it or not, we live in interesting times, where personal decisions are intertwined with systemic shifts. This newsletter answers a reader question that explores my recent transition from corporate leadership to entrepreneurship, a move driven by both personal ambition and a recognition of the changing nature of work. I’ll also delve into the ‘Humans Need Not Apply’ debate, examining the line between automation and abstraction, and how we, as humans, can maintain relevance in an increasingly algorithmic world.

Let’s explore the practical steps of a career pivot, while confronting the existential questions posed by the rise of AI!

Ask the Author: Navigating the Leap

👉 Have a question for me? Hit up my Questions Inbox or message me on LinkedIn and I’ll address it in an upcoming newsletter issue! You’ll also get a shout-out. 😊

This question comes from Nick Korte, Co-host of Nerd Journey Podcast, who has been extremely supportive and shared his network of podcasters with me back during the January announcement. I’ve summarized his questions into this singular question:

“Reflecting on your decision to leave Slalom, how did you navigate the emotional and practical aspects of resigning, specifically in terms of your boss, your team, and the transition to entrepreneurship?”

Excellent question! Here’s a breakdown of how I approached it.

The Resignation Conversation

Be classy when it comes to leaving a job. I wrote a one-page document with everything I wanted to say, then I met with my people leader (boss) to discuss my decision at length and make sure we both aligned on the talking points. I gave 5 weeks notice to be sensitive to my position in the company and the disruption my departure would cause. Once the conversation had concluded, I sent a summation via email to officially resign.

The document contained:

• Appreciation for the work and experiences, including examples and details
• Intentional focus to finish my last project fully and successfully, which had 5 weeks remaining to the end date
• Unwavering devotion to continue to serve my people by completing annual performance reviews (due the same month I was resigning) and official company-filed feedback for everyone on my team (people remember how you make them feel)
• Availability to subcontract for a short period upon my departure to avoid putting the team in a lurch (if needed, which it was not)
• Leaving the door open to return in the future should my plans go awry (don’t burn a bridge)

I was straight forward about my plans to take some time off, along with a “plan to make a plan” over the next 6 months while I started something of my own. There didn’t seem to be any reason to hide this. Plus, I wanted to share in the excitement of building something new with my colleagues, many of whom are also friends! 😊

Informing the Team

I let my team and trusted colleagues know shortly after. Reactions were a mixture of sadness in seeing me go combined with excitement to see what I would go build. As the news spread, leaders across the company came up to shake hands or give me some advice. Many other leaders have taken breaks to reset, plan, and recharge. Some come back, some don’t. They understood where I was coming from and reassured me that their doors (and the company’s doors) would remain open. It felt really nice!

If I had instead been hired by another company, instead of going solo, I would have kept the news of my destination to myself because I don’t feel it wise to share that sort of thing until I actually start the next job. You never know what might happen between leaving one job and starting the next and karma is a bitch.

I set up a quarterly lunch with my team so we can go eat 🌮 tacos and be nerds together on a recurring basis. The last was one was in February and was super fun! There’s not a bad bone among the group and everyone was welcoming and asked a million questions about how things were going.

People Leadership

When I joined Slalom, I was pretty adamant about not being a people leader for the first year or so. I was burned out from the past 6 years of leading entire departments filled with managers and individuals. However, due to the rapid growth of my consulting group, I hired 4 individual contributors before the first year was over. The alternative was overloading my boss with direct reports. I was one of the few folks with leadership experience in a rapidly growing team, so I stepped up out of necessity. Sometimes you just have to be the adult in the room.

I don’t mind being a people leader or manager but it’s not my first love. Due to the way consulting works, I rarely worked on projects directly with my team, making it extremely hard to influence their growth and adequately judge their performance. I would much prefer to work with my team. I want to see how they think, how they respond to situations, and how they perform and react in meetings with clients. That’s the part I’m passionate about, and it balances against all the “HR stuff” that is much less fun (but entirely necessary) to do.

I am VERY happy about leaving people leadership behind, I really NEED the break. It’s extremely important and HEALTHY to pendulum between being a people leader and being an individual contributor from time to time.

I still mentor a handful of folks. Being a people leader is not required for being a mentor and positively influencing the hearts and careers of others. At least as a solo entrepreneur, I know for certain that I can now finally take the break I’ve wanted and remain as an individual contributor until I’m ready to hire.

The Shift to Entrepreneurship

The origin of my desire to go solo came from two places.

The first is my wife, Nella. She’s been an entrepreneur for most of her adult life, and is my most trusted source of guidance. I was working late one evening last Fall when my wife came into my home office as I was ranting about the financial tracking work I was doing. I owned everything about my projects – staffing plans, timecard tracking, invoicing, maintaining margin, designing the solution, leading the delivery team, status reports. Everything. Nella commented that I was already running my own small business. That’s when it dawned on me – duh, she’s right!

Add to that the second source, which is Slalom’s “business builder” mindset. Slalom wanted all Director titles and above to feel like entrepreneurs inside the company building their own businesses. This meant that I already had a taste of the Kool-Aid in the form of formal training in executive leadership, financial management, program management, solution ownership, emotional communications, change management, contracting vehicles, and other “scary hard stuff” from some of the best in the business. People with 30+ years of experience on billion dollar programs. Slalom builds leaders for breakfast, lunch, and dinner – it was part of why I was so attracted to the organization.

Given Nella’s inspiration and my Slalom training and experience running a mini-business, I asked myself: why not do that for myself, instead of for others? The rest is history.

I hope this gives you some insight into my journey. It was a complex decision with many layers, but ultimately, it felt like the right step for me.

Avoiding Anti Patterns

I very intentionally did NOT do several things:

• I did NOT post some long sob story on LinkedIn about the job change with a million people tagged to garner attention and likes that do not matter. I kinda hate these posts.
• I did NOT update my profile to say “Chris has a new job doing X” because, again, it doesn’t matter – there is no substance to that in my mind. I made the change silently.
• I did NOT send out a massive communication internally at Slalom with my departure. I let people close to me know, and that’s it, because it really wasn’t anyone else’s business what I was doing.

As Tom Holland said: “If you have a problem with me, text me. If you don’t have my number then you probably don’t know me well enough to have a problem with me.”

When I finally did post something about the change, it was because I had something to share – the new podcast! And I didn’t even post this until I had 4 episodes in the can. You do you, boo, but I think actions speak louder than words, and results speak louder than intentions.

Thoughtfully Critical Podcast Update

I continue to try and level up my video editing game. The most recent episode focuses on my usage of AI tools and their impact on my small business.

Humans Need Not Apply

YouTuber CPG Grey published a video 10 years ago titled Humans Need Not Apply. This resurfaced in my subscription feed as the advent of AI tools and agents are once again bringing this topic and existential questions into light.

This is a hard time for many people. My LinkedIn feed is filled with people looking for jobs after being let go from tech companies. Several US stock markets are headed into the red, decimating retirement savings. The price of basic staples like food (🥚eggs!), housing, rent, and automobiles are sky high. It’s hard not to let the whirlwind of negatively pick you up and toss you around a bit. I try to stay informed without getting too caught up in the bad vibes, but the bad vibes exist.

Let me offer a few data points to help counter these feelings, if even for a moment.

Keep Calm and Carry On

I recently attended the 22nd annual SCaLE (Southern California Linux Expo) down in Pasadena, California. It was my first one, and is now an event that I will DEFINITELY attend again in the future. Family friendly, great speakers, minimal vendor bullshit, and game nights – hell yes! In a word: AMAZING. I’ll talk more on this in the next Thoughtfully Critical podcast, don’t worry.

A familiar face was part of the speaking crowd, the infamous Kelsey Hightower. I sat in during his hour long Q&A session and later in a panel on the chaos of software development. The man drops gold nuggets of wisdom like a gumball machine. He was asked opinions on AI and impact on the job market in both forums. Kelsey says that he advises startups and helps perform due diligence for investors of said startups.

I’m paraphrasing a bit, but his POV was:

“Will AI replace your job? Well, what is your job? Think about abstraction vs. automation. You’re a human, be one.”

And another one:

“Growth by any means is insane. Grow forever equals die. Focus on purpose and clarity. You don’t need a better paintbrush to be a better painter; you need to learn to think.”

There’s a lot of low level, repetitive tasks out there. These tasks are ripe for automation. But the abstraction layers, the cognitive layers, and the creative juices must still flow – and that’s where humans can and will remain. Other speakers likened today’s AI to having 4 year-olds with vast knowledge but little to no context, and I’d agree – the context matters (it always has). And humans are pretty damn good at context.

By the way, I HIGHLY recommend reading this article from luminary Ash Pembroke (one of my favorite people) titled GenAI: Are Humans Horses? I first met Ash years ago while at Slalom as part of a collaboration with Slalom’s S2 (Slalom Strategy) team, the research / strategy arm of the organization. Come for the deep dive, stay for the #horsegirlsunite.

Taking Action

So what can you do about it and how can you take action? Another YouTuber named Productive Peter offers some advice on the Wisdom Tax. I’d suggest watching this video. I’d suggest doing what he says by really digging deep into how you operate, how you think, what value you perceive to offer the world, and how to trade in willpower for better systems design.

As my Mom always told me:

“Don’t sweat the small things. And everything is a small thing.”

Interesting Links

Here are some fun, interesting, and educational links that I’ve gathered to share with you.

Pour a little 🍷 out for Skype. Love it or hate it, this was the same platform I first started using when recording podcast episodes over a decade ago – everyone had a local recording going, plus the Skype recording, and then we mixed them all together manually to produce the mp3 file.

This article from The Technium on Class 1 and Class 2 problems was fascinating to me. I’m late to the game on this one.

Arvid Lunnemark, Co-founder of Anysphere (maker of Cursor), wrote It Is Time to Move Beyond End-to-End Encryption back in 2021. I found this while I was doing research on the company and really enjoyed the way he explains both encryption and metadata.

It’s finally becoming cheaper to move to Austin, as Bloomberg reports Austin Rents Tumble 22% From Peak on Massive Home Building Spree. I guess if you build more rental properties, the balance of supply and demand shifts. Imagine that! 😜

Reader Lothilus shared a Hugging Face Agents Course that he’s taking. Looks cool, I’m tempted to carve out time to go through this myself.

Infamous YouTuber Technology Connections published Algorithms are breaking how we think. Get off my lawn you dirty hippies! Jokes aside, I’m one of those very few who actually use the YouTube subscription feed, generally avoids the algorithmic recommendations (I feel this just leads to doom scrolling and information bubbles), and uses Unhook to clean up my YouTube page in Chrome.

Reader Lior shared this GitHub Issue Forms link. You can define different input types, validations, default assignees, and default labels for your issue forms. Note: Issue forms are currently in public preview and subject to change.

That’s it for this issue! Let’s talk again soon. ✌️& 💙

Over the past few months, I’ve been constructing a robust, enterprise-like cloud environment for my company, Wahl Network, to serve as a platform for building, testing, and deploying my applications. Many of these applications are experiments and proofs of concepts used for learning (self-improvement!) and clients (revenue stream!).

I believe that having a solid framework, platform, and release process yields higher quality results with quicker release cycles even though it’s just me on the team (for now).

Unrealistic, Insecure Environments

The realization struck me during this build process that the majority of the training materials I had utilized were heavily focused on idealized lab environments. These lab setups conveniently glossed over crucial real-world considerations. They typically employed a single cloud account, granted unrestricted access to a solitary super-admin, and treated security as an afterthought – a concept to be addressed in “real-world” scenarios, but not within the confines of the lab.

This approach struck me as fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.

It raises the question: why perpetuate a training model that instructs individuals on how to construct insecure environments? These environments do not adequately prepare them for the complexities and potential pitfalls they will inevitably encounter in real-world scenarios. This approach not only fosters a false sense of security but also fails to instill the critical importance of security considerations from the outset.

The Launch of Essentials Courses

I’m currently conducting an experiment where I’m creating free “essentials” type courses specifically designed to be beginner-friendly and accessible. These courses are hosted on YouTube with decks posted to SlideShare for anyone to share and enjoy.

My first course, Getting Started with AWS – Enterprise Landing Zone for Terraform Learning & Development, just launched today!

What’s Makes These Essentials Courses Unique / Different?

What sets these free courses apart is their focus on real-world applications and their beginner friendly nature. I incorporate components and scenarios that you’re likely to encounter when searching for a job in the tech industry. To make the learning experience more engaging, I’ve included achievement badges, friendly cartoon characters, and, of course, my signature dry humor. 😉

I believe this approach will not only make the content more enjoyable but also provide practical skills that are directly applicable to the job market.

Summary

I know my first essentials courses will not be perfect and I will continue to learn how to make better courses with your support and feedback. I have thick skin – take a peek and let me know what you think, both good and bad!

✌️ & 💙

The featured image is from a walk I was on with a friend across the Pfluger Pedestrian Bridge in Austin. I find sunrise to be such an inspiring and uplifting sight and I wanted to share that joy with you all. ✌️

Ask the Author: Preparing to Leave Corporate Life

👉 Have a question for me? Hit up my Questions Inbox or message me on LinkedIn and I’ll address it in an upcoming newsletter issue! You’ll also get a shout-out. 😊

The most common question I have received in the months since going solo is basically – how did you know when it was time to leave, and what is your plan?

My decision to leave my well-paying job was not an easy one. I have spent years thinking about going solo and even hired a coach to better understand the “why” behind my desires. It’s really scary to make such a big change and I’ve only known the corporate life for my adult career. There’s always been a paycheck coming in from somewhere, which feels safe and secure.

My decision really boiled down to three things that live in my heart:

1. I hate being managed; I can self-direct my own interests without the need for external structure.
2. I want to be heard and feel that I have opinions and experiences to share; I like a one-to-many audience.
3. My greatest source of joy is giving knowledge to others via sharing, teaching, and mentoring.

My grand plan? To come up with a plan. But here’s the thing: I’m a one-speed kind of guy. When I’m in, I’m all in. My job was sucking up every last drop of creative juice, leaving me with zero brainpower for, well, anything else. So, bye-bye day job, hello six months of glorious, uninterrupted planning time.

I’m in full-on exploration mode! Think of it as a personal Renaissance. I’m dabbling in all sorts of art, binge-watching YouTube tutorials to level up my writing and editing game, wrestling with new code (React, JSX, Javascript – the whole shebang!), and even diving headfirst into the world of pro video editing. Every day is a mini-adventure, and I’m getting clearer on what excites me and what just makes me yawn.

The only way to know these answers is to experiment.

My approach is simple: break it down, figure it out, execute. Just like I always have. The patterns will emerge, the revenue will follow. I’m not afraid to ask for help – I know I don’t know everything.

And yeah, I could go back to the corporate world if I wanted. But this isn’t about a paycheck. It’s about me. Giving myself a real chance to build something special. And if I succeed? I’m taking a few people with me. That’s the dream. 😊

Thoughtfully Critical Podcast: We’ve Reached 700+ Streams!

Podcasting is such a new experience this time around. Both myself and technology have dramatically changed since my Datanauts days. In its first 30 days of “being a podcast,” Thoughtfully Critical has reached about 730 streams across all platforms with Deep Work continuing to lead the pack in terms of total streams.

If you’re dealing with technical debt (and who isn’t?), give Tackling Technical Debt: Strategies for Success a listen. One major benefit of my consulting experiences have been seeing dozens of unique companies take on – and struggle to pay off – technical debt. Check it out.

In an effort to try something new, I’ve started publishing a video version of the podcast with 80’s BBS Adventures and Coding Quests! This is a nostalgic look back at my experiences as a kid growing up in the 80s, getting to code on a Apple IIe, and ultimately joining the world of bulletin board systems (BBSs) for discussions, games (MUDs!), and more. Watching the video isn’t required and I’m very new to this artform, but I’m hooked!

Upcoming Podcast Episodes

Expect future podcast episodes to continue offering a video, along with “talking head” commentary now that I’ve setup my home office for recording. I’m working on podcast episodes talking about my horrible experiences buying a PowerMac G4 (the reason I left Apple and never looked back) and my usage of AI tools – you can read more on that in Reviving 15 Years of WordPress Content with NotebookLM.

🔭 Sneak peek to next week’s title: Choosing the Right Tools: Balancing Benefits and Trade-Offs in Tech. There’s a lot of memes buried throughout. 😉

YouTube Channel Updates

Established in 2012, the Wahl Network YouTube channel is where I show people the things I do in my home lab and cloud lab. I spend days tinkering and building, distill that down into short pieces of educational video, and then release the content for free.

Above is graph showing views to the channel. In total, there are 1.5 million.

• 2012 – 2015: I started strong, producing new videos regularly for about the first 3 years.
• 2015 – 2019: Then, at the first red arrow, I got hired at Rubrik as their Chief Technologist and life got super busy.
• 2020: I returned to video creation as the pandemic hit, as shown by the second red arrow, but my mental state was pretty garbage and I burned out quickly.
• 2021 – 2024: I joined Slalom as a delivery consultant focused on building complex systems, which absolutely drained every ounce of creative energy I had.

YouTube Partner Program

I’ve always made videos as a hobby in my spare time while juggling a family and a day job. Now, however, I’m focused and in a great mental state. I’ve rolled up my sleeves and am ready to learn how to make great educational content once more! Editing in today’s world of technology and AI is VASTLY different than when I started – it’s much simpler to edit content because there’s a plethora of amazing tools that compete with Adobe.

I’ve re-signed my YouTube Partner Program agreement and am once again uploading videos. To kick things off, you can find all of the video episodes of Thoughtfully Critical in this YouTube playlist along with some shorts with snipets from the show.

Upcoming Video Content

I’m currently working on an educational series for folks wanting to setup production-like AWS environments for learning, using infrastructure as code tools (e.g. Terraform) and CI/CD (e.g. GitHub Actions) without having to worry about setting their money on fire.

Innovator Tier Memberships Available

Want to support the channel and get a little something in return? I’ve just launched an “Innovator” membership tier. For just $3 a month, you’ll get a special badge next to your name (it levels up the longer you’re a member!) and I’ll personally respond to your comments. Think of it as a super affordable way to get my insights whenever you have a question – way cheaper than booking a consulting session! 😉

I have plans to offer more tiers with early access to content, access to exclusive content, and special Q&A sessions with me once I get the ball rolling.

In the meantime, stay tuned and drop a subscription (it’s free!). 💖

Interesting Links

Here are some fun, interesting, and educational links that I’ve gathered to share with you.

This hilarious folks at Under Studio published this funny short on negotiations during an interview.

I was looking for a good article on flaky tests, and Managing Flaky Tests at Scale: Detection and Quarantining by The Trunk Team is worth a read.

Jennifer Riggins drops a truth bomb over at The New Stack with Developers Unhappy With Tool Sprawl, Lagging Data, Long Waits. Developers are never happy, though, so I guess this is status quo? 😁

I found Enhancing Rovo Chat with Hybrid LLM Approach by Steven Yoo, Senior Principal Engineer at Atlassian, to contain wise nuggets and interesting insights. Atlassian’s Work Life blog is one of the few vendors that actually publishes good stuff.

Rewind the clock to 2014 and listen to Think Like a Child on the Freakanomics Radio. One of my favorite podcasts of all time, this episode hits me the hardest and helped me reset when my mental state was going in the wrong direction.

GitHub has really given their Copilot tool the “juice” with GitHub Copilot: The agent awakens. I’ve spent most of this week giving the new Copilot experience a spin. Will they finally give Cursor a run for the money?

Finally, DevEx as a service: Scaling DevOps teams with Platform Engineering by Matthew Casperson from the Octopus Deploy team. It’s a long title but a really good read. I saw it over on the Platform Engineering Slack.

That’s it for this issue! Let’s talk again soon. ✌️& 💙