LISA18 Session notes – Failure at Netflix velocity

One of the big themes at LISA18 was the fast emerging discipline of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). This approach to resiliency was born out of hyper-scale consumer cloud apps like Google, Facebook and Netflix but the principles are starting to resonate across the industry. Failure at Netflix velocity, by Dave Hahn, Netflix Netflix is big, […]

LISA18 session notes – SLO Burn

Last week, I had the pleasure of visiting Nashville, Tennessee, for the Usenix LISA18 conference. Its always refreshing to take a break from the Microsoft conference circuit and spend some time learning from the wider industry. I try to travel light at conferences like this, relying on pen and paper – but over the next […]

Don’t install apps one-by-one, use Windows 10’s PowerShell PackageManagement. Here is how…

TL;DR – It’s about time Windows had its own take on apt-get. Use the new Win10 PackageManagement (OneGet) powershell commands to install your favorite apps from the Chocolatey repo (and others). Chocolatey has packages to all the common apps you use like Chrome, WinRAR, 1Password, DropBox, Visual Studio etc etc. For Office, use the powershell […]

5 Big 2016 Predictions based on wishful thinking, bluster and too much coffee.

2016 is the year that even your non-tech friends will start using expert systems or bots driven by machine learning and natural language processing Apple releases “one more thing…” that is actually just a slightly different shaped old thing that will be hailed as “The Next Big Thing” but just end up.in your box of […]

Planning for Office 365 – from Ignite 2015

Ignite 2015 seemed like only yesterday – but is now over 3 months ago. Now that Office 2016 is being finalized, its almost time to update some of this guidance and get out on the road again. Anyway, here is my session on planning for Office 365 deployments from Chicago, back in May. Preparing […]

The next big thing is… print?

When the US State Department resorts to the same marketing methods as your neighborhood shredmetal/skapop/folk fusion band, something strange is going on. Sighted at SXSWInteractive.

Is it cheaper to mitigate than to debate security?

Interesting anecdote from this GigaOM story: The former 21st Century Fox CIO realized that it was cheaper to accept the risk and pay for the mitigation rather than to pay for the lawyers to argue about the security controls they needed.

Throw out the (email) rulebook

For the past 7 years I have been fairly religious about clearing out my mailbox. Every time I took a holiday break, I’d set an email OOF and instruct recipients in no uncertain terms that upon my return I would archive all of my email and start fresh. This is important for a number of […]

New year, new blog

It is an amazing time for technology… and time for this blog to change names… over the past few years we have all witnessed the incredible march of progress as information technology continues to redefine every business, pastime or human endeavor. Taxis, food delivery, television, fashion and even walking your dog are all part of […]