Blogs

I live in a small city which is extraordinarily easy to cycle through. Everything is a short distance, the cycle infrastructure is kept tidy and there is a distinct absence of anything that could even remotely be considered a hill.

The games industry is weird: It simultaneously lags behind the rest of the tech industry by half-a-decade in some areas and yet it can be years ahead in others. What attracted me to the industry was not the glossy veneer working on entertainment products, or making products that I enjoyed using (I wouldn’t describe myself as a gamer): I love solving problems, especially problems that are not easily solved.

The title is not going to be a surprise to anyone reading this, but I’m getting frustrated and I have to vent. At Sharkmob1 we use Microsoft products… not really surprising; Microsoft Office is extremely common and- we make games.

What is “DevOps”? is a question I’ve heard a lot, often I’ve asked it implicitly to myself when reading job ads for “DevOps Engineers”. According to Patrick Debois, a Belgian “agile” consultant and former sysadmin who coined the term in January of 2009: the term “Devops” (not “DevOps”) was supposed to be “Agile System Administrator”.

I’m sure you have already formulated an opinion about how I’m wrong. That’s fine, but I invite you to at least open your mind a little before you hit back and inform me of how stupid I am.

When I start at a new company, I always do a refresher on my key security. One thing I always hate about SSH is that the encryption scheme is pretty basic actually, and once your ssh-agent is loaded- anything can just request a sign/authorize.

Ok, I’ll admit, I’m not the largest fan of centralisation, but rarely do I so swiftly and effectively feel the crushing weight of it. I happen to use a very nice Chromium-based web-browser which, when it opens has javascript disabled.

I’ve been struggling for some time to find a decent enough guide to actually accomplish anything meaningful (other than ad-hoc break-fix work) in my office. One of the things I know is that this problem seems to affect me more than others, so for many people this advice (or lamentation) might seem like it comes from a weird place.