I was invited by Adam Lange and Adam Haertle to share my story in “rozmowa KONtrolowana” podcast (in Polish). I’d like to thank both of them and of course all of participants for invitation, leading it, questions and nice way to spend time in familiar, geeky environment :) now - just view/listen to it your favorite format :)
i posted quite emotional piece some time ago - on real world warriors that really don’t need to do anything more than they already did. despite that, they want more. publicity, fame and to achieve that - they use lies. it seems even poster hero of US - killed sniper Chris Kyle did a bit of lying himself. and it seems he was even warned specifically against it by his superior - that he can’t make false claims about number of medals he received. despite that, and despite that America is quite open in areas where they shouldn’t probably be so (well, i’m from Poland, and pre-1989 nobody would even thought on getting documentation about discharged soldiers so easily) so checking such claims can be very easy. Chris DD-214 document differs a bit from his book story and obviously, the story Hollywood wants you to believe. ...
how David defeated Goliath this story started in June of this year. one of Apple AppStore employees made an “error” while reviewing revision of Basecamp authors new app - Hey. David Heinemeier Hansson, one of the Basecamp founders, took it to Twitter David is not only Basecamp CEO, he’s author of series of great books on running teams and companies. he started to relay live on Twitter emails he and his employees exchanged with Apple Application Store team. as Apple takes anything between 15 to 30% of sales cut out of every in-app transaction, they suddenly asked him to include payment option in Hey. David argued, that the app never had and doesn’t plan to have option to buy anything. ...
after last 13 years spent at Cisco Systems Poland, working in the “field” I decided it’s prime time for something new. something, that can challenge me and give back that sense of new adventure. having opportunity to spend all that time with great people, learning a lot and experiencing even more was great fun. i went through full country chain - from “simple” Systems Engineer, to Architecture Lead, Systems Engineer Manager, then Regional Sales Manager (driving 2/3rds of country business operations) and finally Country Systems Engineer Manager and CTO. those thirteen years bring together the best moments (like ability to see your interns grow into SEs and then develop in different roles, or meeting Customers and Partners on countless conferences and events, including Cisco Forum and Cisco Connect) and some of the most challenging and stressful in my life as well. living with weight of your decisions and learning on your own errors, taking ownership of having those hard 1:1 discussions… and ultimately also having to let some people go was really a steep learning curve (and opportunity) i won’t ever forget. some day i may share some of my observations - it’s still too early I believe. ...
last couple of weeks were quite hectic. I’m working on rebuilding the BGP blackholing infrastructure (yes, that’s old site, along with old, expired certificate), along with some extras (like AS112 and RPKI services). the job is like 40% done, with scripts completely rewritten in Python, and the ‘only’ part missing being infra (virtualized and not-so-much) and WWW portal. at the same time, I’ve committed long time ago to new project with failure post-mortem analysis on our netdesign.zone which by itself waits for refreshing the underlying infrastructure (this may end up also migrating to Hugo from WordPress). ...
as it’s easy to notice, I did a site migration. instead of moving to WordPress however (which was original plan), i decided to follow more ambitious path, and deploy Hugo platform, supported by Go… and static page generation (yeah!). Hugo itself supports i18n, so it provides the most important functionality. it doesn’t hurt that this solution frees me also from continuous tinkering in PHP and SQL :)
…and in particular, often goes very badly. not only in life in general, but also in the IT world :) you probably have dozens of stories to tell, if not hundreds. someone configured the port badly, everything worked until it stopped … and when it stopped, it dragged the whole network behind. big time. whole data center. why do we make the same mistakes all the time? automation slightly improves the situation, but sometimes it may dramatically speed up things going bad. I have already written about the ‘black box’ method - we do not use it in IT. yes, we met during various ‘fuckup nights’ type of events (kudos) for Bartek Górczyński, who, using his extensive experience of many drama cases in IT, spoke bluntly and openly), but for ‘hard’ infrastructure - there is not much, and if it is, is treated rather, as an example, rather than a ready recipe for what conclusions to draw. Andrzej Gab and Robert Woźny started such a cycle to organize at PLNOG. ...
i just realised, that there’s a port! you just need to install xhyve… and that’s it. you don’t need VMware or VirtualBox anymore. have a great virtualization!
all three books are great, and whole trilogy - delightful. they’re refreshing in style, and for me personally very similar to writings of Stanisława Lema (well, at least there where it’s close to intergalactic travels and technology) and Asimov. everything embedded into chinese cultural environment that i studied recently for professional reasons). some of that can be seen very clearly in long term (really long term) strategies mixed with tactical execution. ...
for the first time in a few years I took three weeks of vacation. …and this is starting to catch up with me :) i took few books with myself, but only some of them are worth mentioning - like ‘Hit refresh’ by Satya Nadella (though I have not read it yet) and ‘Now. The physics of time’ - I am in the process and it is fascinating to read. the remaining two positions will remain in the shadow of oblivion. ...