Introduction (who am I?)

Hello, Tommy here. I work at vistaprint. I spend most of my time monitoring a website, writing internal tools, and doing things some would consider "Devops".

I'm not very qualified as a blogger, quite frankly my English skills are terrible.

My perspective is not very unique at this point. The industry is full of developer/sysadmin employees, and devops has become an industry movement. This movement has created in my opinion a 'trendy effect' to what some would consider little more than a buzz word.

Recruiting, I am sure is a tough job (I wouldn't actually know), but often being on the other end I see pitfalls that a lot of recruiters fall into. So for all of you recruiters, please do not do these things.

One of the major systems that will stop you from losing money is your testing environment. The ability to properly test patches before they are put into production is a must.

Recieving feedback

Giving and receiving feedback, allows us to maintain our strengths while improving our weaknesses. There are two major types of feedback, constructive, and reinforcing. Constructive feedback is asking someone to change behavior, while reinforcing is acknowledging good behavior.

Providing feedback

Feedback is a two way street if you are willing to hear your strengths reinforced, you should be able to handle what people think are your flaws.

One of the things that I often see in our industry is the culture of access control. Security measures are put into place, because you wish to restrict access to a certain thing. Systems like HRIS need such restrictions, as private information should not be publicly available to the company. However often systems that don't need security controls put into place end up having them.

Most people understand where they fall in the business, and the authority delegated to them.

• Day Two

I am here in lovely Portland Oregon attending Monitorama. Monitorama is a 3 day open source monitoring convention.

Monitorama had catered food, and drink. The food was plentiful and delicious, and the drinks were amazing.

There were 10 talks, I have made a quick summarization below. I don't have time to write in detail about each one, but I am sure you will get the gist from the basic summary.

• Day One

Day 2 was full of math based paranoia, math, and puppet(s)....

Growing up I always wanted to work with electronics, and as soon as I could work I was working with a computer. I currently work as a Software Engineer at Vistaprint. I work on the Gallery team, which is an agile development team that works on our platform to display products in a gallery (hence the name). Before I joined the gallery team, I spent most of my career doing ops things.

I spend much of my time at Vistaprint just being a normal developer. In fact its over 75% of what I do. I am a Web Developer, however with my background in ops I have spent more and more time at Vistaprint doing configuration management, and coaching other teams how to approach the subject.

In case you haven't notice, this blog has not gotten updates much this summer. Some people have even noticed the overall lack of activity on my GitHub. Emails have gone, several weeks unanswered.

A few weeks ago I ran a 3 day event at Vistaprint. We had many engineers fly into our organization. These engineers are from both other countries, and even other companies. We essentially had a mini 3 day conference, and I had to run it! I learned quite a bit about running a conference.