A collection of nerdy things done in nerdy ways to break, fix, and learn technology
When co-hosting a podcast, you try to find the theme of the episode and create a catchy title. Recently we had a virtual farewell for a beloved co-worker and friend, and one of the folks in the meeting spoke up near the end to nail the theme…there are no cheat days. Losing a co-worker, boss,…
Recently I’ve been reading A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring by John Wooden and Don Yaeger, and I came across an interesting quote from former UCLA player Andy Hill that struck me: You often don’t recognize your mentors at the time they’re deeply involved in your life; and mentoring often occurs even…
I recently learned VMware has an open source project for chaos engineering called Mangle, and I thought it would be fun to do a little exploring. After all, the name sounds pretty cool, and I know almost nothing about chaos engineering. So let’s create a little chaos, shall we? This will be the first in…
I recently read a great blog by Tom Hillingsworth called Racing on the Edge of Burnout, and it was one of those reads that made me sit and think for a while. Then I read it again and thought a bit more. I began to wonder if the article was about me, whether now or…
I remember the article snippet taped to the mirror above my bed during high school and college. It was an article written by pro golfer Curtis Strange. In the article, Strange talked about how pounding golf balls on a driving range wouldn’t help someone improve if the mental aspect of their game wasn’t right. Though…
This is part 7 of my quest to explore Azure Functions for self-education in functions-as-a-service. The goal of this post is to successfully instrument an Azure function for OpenTracing to visualize the function call inside Tanzu Observability (AKA Wavefront). Back in part 1, we explored Azure Functions and Function Apps via the Azure portal. In part 2 we…
In 2019, I posted my reading list here and some reasons for the choices. In early 2020 I began to wonder if I could keep up the same pace or perhaps even accelerate it. When you tell family and friends to get you Audible gift cards for Christmas, you end up with a lot of…
Not that a post can’t be personal, but this one is more personal than most you will see from me. The words in part 1 below were written by my wife, and it’s something I think is worth sharing. And at the very end, I’ll add my own details to the story (part 2). Part…
It all starts with an idea. A friend approaches you about doing a podcast. You agree, wondering if you really have anything valuable to add to the content. The two of you hash out the idea a little and decide to go for it. So thus John White and I came up with our signature…
I see an empty conference center where VMworld once sat. If you’ve never attended VMworld in person, it’s a completely overwhelming experience for the first time attendee. Now that it’s virtual and free to attend, it’s more accessible to us all. But it can still be overwhelming. I wanted to take a few minutes to…