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Book Review: Learning to Learn and the Navigation of Moods by Gloria P. Flores

One can create a mindset highly open and receptive to learning quickly by managing one’s moods. That’s what learning researcher and psychologist Gloria Flores argues in her book Learning to Learn. She argues that only by modifying the less-productive (for learning) moods towards more productive ones, does learning get easier....

A tale of the treacherous task of Kubernetes upgrade

This is a tale of unmitigated blast radius in networking. I broke two of our developer environments the second day of joining the infrastructure squad. We discovered several potential issues with our workflow and engineering practices. Let me explain how that happened, and what we did to fix it. We’ll...

Infrastructure management: from chaos to Cloudformation CDK to confusion

Our team decided to use Amazon’s infrastructure-management tooling versus other available tooling a while back. We are now reconsidering the decision.

Don't hoard your engineering players, let them out in the field

Well-run organizations can fall into the trap of ‘hoarding’ their star performers. They keep them ‘on the bench’, not deploying them for big, risky, challenging projects. That’s an unnecessary inefficiency. As in sports, allowing your strongest players to go out to the field gives them practice. It also improves general...

Making this blog

This is an old post from a now-deprecated website. I’m keeping it around only for historical preservation reasons. Not much of it is relevant to the website you’re currently reading on.