Welcome to Sleepless Links! This is my (sometimes) regular collection of things that I’ve read recently that I’ve found interesting and thought-provoking. I’ve let my publishing habit for these lapse a bit, and I’m trying to get back to it. Hopefully you find some of them worthwhile as well! Here’s what I’ve been reading during the week ending April 2nd, 2023. Steve Yegge posted a stormer about LLMs and their potential for disrupting the process of writing code in Cheating is All You Need. Agree...

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 on Twitter for close to fifteen years. For most of that time I’ve predominantly chosen to consume rather than produce. Given the recent developments and ownership, I simply can’t participate any longer. This isn’t going to affect Twitter in the slightest, but for me it’s a major step since Twitter has been my primary source of connection to news, events, fellow technology travelers, and like-minded enthusiasts for quite a long time. It assumed an especially large role when I...

Welcome to Sleepless Links! This is my (sometimes) weekly collection of things that I’ve read recently that I’ve found interesting and thought-provoking. Hopefully you find some of them worthwhile as well! Here’s the curated list of links for the week ending June 26th, 2022: Crypto is first up this week, largely because of the recent major downward movements in BTC price but also because it seems that the tide of sentiment may be slowly shifting. I’ve never really understood the reasoning behind...