The default syndication mechanism for Hugo is RSS 2.0. This is great, and it works perfectly well, but for a few reasons1 I wanted to provide an Atom feed instead. As I dug into what it would take to make this happen, I uncovered a number of good resources that pointed me in right general direction, but no single comprehensive “how-to” guide that I could follow. I’ve tried to collect up the steps and resources that I used below so that it might help others that want to do the same. I have also...
As I mentioned in this post, I’ve essentially abandoned Twitter in favor of Mastodon (you can find me on Mastodon via the link over there –> ). Now that I’m getting more active there, I wanted a quick and easy way to post new items published here to my Mastodon account for broader distribution and visibility. My initial inspiration came from this Dr. Drang post. At the time I wasn’t thinking about anything more complex than a simple script, but as I dove into the Mastodon API and ways to...
As I described in the introduction to this series, I’ve used the acronym C3-P-O as a tool to help the teams I lead remember some key principles for maintaining a healthy infrastructure environment. This post is about the “O” in the acronym - Observability. I touched on Observability in my previous post on PRO Infrastructure, so I won’t go into much further detail here other than to reinforce the principle. It is vitally important that all aspects of a service’s behavior can be seen, tracked,...
As I described in the introduction to this series, I’ve used the acronym C3-P-O as a tool to help the teams I lead remember some key principles for maintaining a healthy infrastructure environment. This post is about the “P” in the acronym - Predictability. Before we dig into the details of this part of the acronym, I want to clarify the meaning and intent of using the term Predictability. First, let’s see how Merriam-Webster defines it: I specifically talk about Predictability for the meaning...
As I described in the introduction to this series, I’ve used the acronym C3-P-O as a tool to help the teams I lead remember some key principles for maintaining a healthy infrastructure environment. This post is about the third “C” in the acronym - Continuity. For infrastructure services in particular, continuity of operation is critical. The saying used to be that infrastructure services had to be like the dial tone - always there when you need it (for those of you who remember what “dial tone”...
As I described in the introduction to this series, I’ve used the acronym C3-P-O as a tool to help the teams I lead remember some key principles for maintaining a healthy infrastructure environment. This post is about the second “C” in the acronym - Currency. Maintaining software and hardware currency in technology infrastructure is critical for ensuring stability, security, and supportability. While you absolutely need to work to keep things current, this doesn’t mean that you should take up...
As I described in the introduction to this series, I’ve used the acronym C3-P-O as a tool to help the teams I lead remember some key principles for maintaining a healthy infrastructure environment. This post is about the first “C” in the acronym - Consistency. High levels of operational overhead can often be traced directly back to inconsistencies in the environment. Inconsistency in hardware, configuration, software, or firmware between like components can lead to differences in behavior, slow...
I like acronyms. More specifically, I like being able to capture concepts with acronyms that can help practitioners remember and internalize them. You may have noticed this in my posts about TILT, PRO, and ACID. An acronym that goes back quite a few years in my career is one that I use to convey my guiding principles of reliable and sustainable infrastructure - C3-P-O. It has an interesting origin story. It was around 1:30am when the text came. I don’t think I heard it until the second time it...
I’ve been involved with infrastructure - building it, running it, or leading teams that do - for quite a long time. Much has changed over the years to be sure, but one thing has remained constant: the customers of our infrastructure want us to do everything in our power to make it never fail. This is an impossible task, obviously. We can get pretty close in a private, on-premises environment, with tools at our disposal such as active/standby or active/active(/active/…) networking devices, highly...
Note: This is part one of a two-part series discussing how we think about Disaster Recovery in the technology world In conversations with other technologists, I still frequently hear people talk about “Disaster Recovery” (DR) even when their applications are hosted in the public cloud. Coincidentally, the last few months have seen some high-profile issues and outages at more than one CSP, and there have been a flurry of blog posts, news stories, and breathless tweets about “reconsidering” using...