author: @sleepyfox
title: ObFOSScation
date: 15-Oct-2024
The problem with #FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) is that everybody thinks they know what it means. I once spent a couple of years working on and off with Ross Gardler, a VP of the Apache Software Foundation and Manager of OSS-Watch in Oxford.
author: @sleepyfox
title: Microservices Day
date: 12-May-2016
On Tuesday NearForm put on their 'Microservices Day' free one-day single-track conference, which was actually better than many paid-for conferences that I've been to in the past. Not only was the quality of the presentations overall very good, but all of the (very professionally produced) videos are available on YouTube:
author: @sleepyfox
title: The rise of foxy thinking
date: 4-Jan-2013
Now that we've survived the Mayan Apocalypse I predict that 2013 will see the rise of the generalist over the specialist.
This article last year from Harvard Business Review by Vikram Mansharamani, lecturer at Yale and author of 'Boombustology: Spotting Financial Bubbles Before They Burst' references Isaiah Berlin's 1953 essay "The Fox and the Hedgehog" which contrasts hedgehogs that "relate everything to a single, central vision" i.e. specialists, with foxes who "pursue many ends connected...if at all, only in some de-facto way" i.e. generalists. Berlin's essay is itself based upon the Greek poet Archilochus who wrote that "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing."
author: @sleepyfox
title: Software storytelling
date: 22-May-2008
Many cultures had, at their pre-industrial stages, a rich oral tradition of storytelling as a means of communicating knowledge, before literacy became widespread.
Bards would gather people around the fire and tell rousing tales, inspiring and edifying a new generation of citizens with their practiced craft of passing along knowledge, morals and cultural values using the medium of entertainment. It seems that now, certain sub-cultures have developed 'secondary orality' as Walter Ong[^1] calls it, the creation of an oral transmission that exists alongside and is enabled by modern media, radio, television and the Internet. I propose that professional software developers can use the ancient art of storytelling to enhance their daily working practices.
Typically when someone is upset with me, they will express it in a way that is, shall we say, sub-optimal. In an ideal world they would come to me, and calmly explain why they are upset with me, perhaps using the Non-Violent Communication template[1] like so:
But this rarely happens. Instead the person who is upset may shout, cry, storm out, or a variety of other emotional responses.
Last Thursday CircleCI had a security breach, and now many companies are struggling, because not only do they have to rotate their credentials for one SaaS provider, but now they have to rotate ALL THE THINGS in their production and non-prod environments because EVERY SECRET EVERYWHERE for EVERY ENVIRONMENT just got leaked. Because they were all in CircleCI. Because you used CircleCI to deploy at the end of your CI step. Deploy to test. Deploy to staging. Deploy to production. And now all your base are belong to 1337 h4xx0r5.
This has caused a lot of people in a lot of companies a lot of pain.
Here are N simple strategies to enable you to avoid this pain:
