Joshua Timberman

Just put it in hadoop

docker is a virus change my mind

At least work is going well. Everything else is utter and complete shit.

These people are monsters.

I’m actually super happy to work in tech at a company that sells something people actually want. It’s really dope.

I can't even remember the last time I was excited and enthusiastic for something some techbro insisted was The Next Big Thing.

They are FULLY out of ideas. It's just scam after scam, now.

Platform engineering is "internal devrel" change my mind

Unrelated, the use of Emacs in the org is spreading and I'm here for it.

All that said, I'm establishing those patterns where I work now. We're going to manage computer operating systems with Chef. It's actually fucking delightful, tbh. I am blessed and get to do this with some of the most delightful humans I've worked with since Chef.

But that is a failing on our part. We never wanted to upset the established workflows. We didn't want people's stuff to break. That's great, but we also deprecated the *wrong* things and didn't promote and replace them with the *right* things aggressively enough.

The best example of this:

We shipped Policyfiles *TEN* years ago.

I still see references and examples that are based on Roles, Environments, Berksfiles, and more. The documentation hasn't bulldozed all that with "USE POLICYFILES WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU."

I mean, we were never *that* prescriptive.

But at first blush it feels like the latest... isn't. I could be missing something!

But I don't think I am, really.

I get it, companies gotta make money, and Progress is a public company that has to make shareholders happy.

But the lifeblood of the product is the community, and that just feels disjointed and outdated. I get it, I've been away for awhile and I'm not up to speed on the latest....

A lot of what we built has become grossly outdated, or has just been completely deleted.

A lot of it still exists, but entropy and atrophy has set in. There's references to EXTREMELY outdated ways of working. And the things that are promoted? They're firmly tied into commercial offerings.

It's really hard to reconcile the fact that the company that Chef became has essentially neglected so much of what we built that made Chef-the-ecosystem *awesome* and *fucking delightful*.

But not everyone has experience with Chef, or even "infrastructure as code" (whatever that means). Fortunately, I know a thing or two!

But man.

It's hard...

So, back to Chef.

We've decided to use it in earnest.

The team I'm on is fucking fantastic. The whole org is full of REALLY smart, capable people. We have a wide diversity of experience with tools, platforms, and services.

I'm on a platform engineering team in this org, and everyone's SUPERB.

Kubernetes IMHO is not so great if you are running an internal platform of disparate tools like a ticket system, a wiki, a source repository, a CI/CD system, or any other set of "on premises tools and internal services" common to large companies.

Guess what the team I'm on is doing.

Like, Kubernetes is cool and I dig it. It's really good if you are building a SaaS application or product where you have the need to run a lot of basically the same kinds of stuff.

You know, like, microservices.

I'm doing a lot more Chef in my new role.

I like a lot of things about this, actually. I think Chef is STILL the *best* way to manage operating system configuration and computer systems at scale.

LLMs are malware.

The Smart People said "Abolish ICE" was too radical. Then ICE kidnapped students, sent innocent people to a mega prison, broke into a car to take a mom from her daughter, and tried questioning elementary kids while lying that they had parents permission.

Ask yourself: which part is more "radical"?

Members of Congress should never be allowed to trade stocks. Period.

lgtm

Yeah I figured no one would care if I wrote about Chef again.

Should I blog about chef again

That moment when you go to write an internal document about an open source tool and wonder "hmm how long ago was that released" and you found that you wrote the original release announcement for the company that sponsored the tool at the time.

Should I do a 16 year reflection? Like or repost this if so.