Recently in opinion Category

Sarcasm setting: Subtle (some of you will miss this disclaimer)

In recent months I've noticed a decided trend towards considering WebKit to be the Internet Default Browser. This is nothing but good, as that is most definitely a driver of industry innovation. The decision by Opera to drop Presto and adopt WebKit was one I cheered; for years Opera has been pissed on by web developers as 'weird', so hopefully this will cause more sites to put that browser-badge on their Supported Browser shelf.

Such monocultures are actually good for the web, as they provide a driver for innovation. Only having to build web-sites to a single quirk-standard makes it a lot easier to create well-working web-sites, and that drives growth. More startups can get out the door faster in order make more money, and as we all know it's startups who disrupt industries. The fact that so many of these startups are using Chrome (and by extension WebKit) as their standard browser is a clear indication that we're heading towards another era of monoculture centered growth.

WebKit conquered the old standard for two big, big reasons:

1. It works on mobile. Mobile is where all the growth is these days, so working on mobile is a major, major thing. And Microsoft wasn't the first mover in this space, Apple (WebKit) was. Firefox (Gecko) doesn't work on mobile (until very, very recently), so it wasn't going to do it either.
2. It also works on Macs. So many webdevs are doing their dev-work on Apple hardware these days that "works on a Mac" is a key driver for growth. IE doesn't. WebKit does.

The modern web is a decidedly heterogeneous place, so the ability to run on anything is very key. IE can't, Firefox only recently got that ability, but WebKit has already been doing that for years. A WebKit monoculture is in the cards.

At least until Google decided to fork it. We don't need more fragmentation in the web rendering spaces, we need less. This saddens me.

Because...

This is why you see outage notices like:

Things broke. We fixed it. Carry on.

And security bulletins like:

This patch fixes a remote access vulnerability in Windows.

Which tends to inflame our detail-oriented sysadminny sensibilities. Our whole world is complexity, we like to see it. Lets us know that things are normal.

This article drifted across my social-sphere in the last couple days:

http://blog.prettylittlestatemachine.com/blog/2013/02/20/what-your-culture-really-says/

It's a critique of startup-culture, especially agile culture. But what do we all mean by culture?

Culture: It's the unwritten rules and expectations governing interpersonal relationships.

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Culture is the expectation that the Owner shall never be talked to except through a manager (jumping the line is really frowned on).

Culture tells you never to leave for home until your manager has left (don't get to the office at 7am, leave at 7pm).

Culture is what keeps the newest-hire from taking more than a single day vacation near Christmas/New Years (we were all in that barrel, now it's your turn).

Culture is the expectation that you're not really working unless you are seen to be in the office with your butt in a chair (don't be the first one in the office, never leave first).

Culture is what forces you to go to after-work outings with your co-workers when it is the owner organizing it, no matter how 'optional' they say it is. (when the boss says 'optional' what he really means is he'll be very disappointed in you but won't fire you).

Culture is what causes all of your coworkers ask you where your job-interview is when you show up to work in a button-up and tie (the only reason a dev wears a tie is to get a job).

Culture is not having a beer fridge in the office. Culture is being thought Not A Team Player if you don't drink.

Culture is not having ping-pong tournaments. Culture is being unable to get in the In Crowd if you have all the hand/eye coordination of a gerbil.

Having lived in startup-land for a while now, rubbed shoulders with the residents, chatted about work/life balance around the free meals at conferences, and all in all been more aware of people talking about startup culture, this article makes a lot of good points.

One friend of mine called out a specific line in this article, the We don't have managers, and the company is managed without a hierarchy one. That's one I hadn't heard of before, but apparently it's a thing. My job isn't like that. We have managers, they... manage. Like they should. Go, team!

A couple of the others are great ideas for smaller companies but completely fail to scale to larger sizes. I'm thinking of, meetings are evil, we have as few of them as possible. Culturally speaking, the failure-mode of no meetings is siloization. If you're small enough everyone is in the same silo, it works. If you're not... problems. This is line is pushed in job-adverts to attract creators, but their managers most definitely have meetings. And sometimes those meetings are sneaky, they're one-on-ones at your desk.

The we don't have a vacation policy thing is spot on. Without that little tickle of, "You have 12 days of vacation left, you're going to lose them if you don't use them by the end of the year," you don't actually take them. At both prior jobs, both with vacation carry-over limits, once most people got enough time on the job to actually hit those limits they actually did hit them. Especially at WWU where I had 4 or 5 weeks of vacation; one co-worker took Fridays off for two months as a way to burn his back. If left to our own devices we'd probably take 2-3 weeks a year.

My current employer is one of the "don't have a vacation policy" places, and people do not take as much vacation as they would if it was being accounted. Due to the gobs of it I got at WWU I'm already used to just taking time off when I need it, but I am missing the 'vacation at home for a week' I ended up taking once in a while to make the books balance.

The we have a team of people who are responsible for organizing frequent employee social events item is not one we have (1: not VC funded, 2: not big enough yet) but I know people who work at such places. And yes, the person in charge of this is a woman, or if it's a team it's mostly women on it. The critique on diversity is very much valid.

Or, those bloody pine/mutt users.

In my experience there are two largish pools of residual ASCII-only email users:

• People who first got on email back when ASCII-only was the only option and have never bothered to update.
• People who first got on email back when ASCII-only was the only option, and vehemently hate HTML in email (it's dangerous!) and actively resist changing their reading mode.

This is one of the areas where sysadmins tend to show off their inherent conservatism, though I've noticed that this twitch only extends to sysadmins who were around back in the ASCII-only Internet (very roughly, anyone born after 1980 is not likely to be such a person).  A lot of us considered our preferences vindicated in the wake of such memorable events as Melissa and Anna Kournikova that completely broke whole email systems, as text-mode users were effectively immune to them(1). We may have a reputation as gadget fiends, but a sizable percentage of us only use GUIs when absolutely unavoidable (Windows Core was made for these people).

With the advent of ubiquitous webmail and the cost of doing email right increasing every year forcing ever larger companies to outsource their email handling to Google or Microsoft, the HTML-in-email boat has sailed. Screen readers, and outright mail readers, for the blind used to be an argument against HTML in mail but even those can handle it in these advanced-computing times. Sure, things like bullets are hard to read, but then, text-mode bullets are just as hard:

The problems from this weekend were:

 * Too many cooks in the kitchen.
 * One too many recipe books. More than one in fact.
 * An out-dated copy of the recipe in someone's hands.
   * This resulted in too little salt.
   * Frank refuses to ever eat anything we make again.
 * Who forgot the plates??

Where the problems come in is using advanced formatting, such as you find in all of those 'newsletters' you get whenever you sign up for a site for any reason. Those are barely intelligible to such readers. Mail with bolding, italics, underlines, lists and indents is quite machine-readable now.

This brings up another sub-set, the text-rendering preference; the mail-reader is quite able to handle HTML but is set to display the plain-text part if one exists. This is most commonly experienced in organizations that allow email "stationary". In my experience, these are not HTML-deniers by in large, they just hate crimes against good formatting-sense(2).

As with anything, the choices you make sometimes get wrapped up in the perception of your own identity. I saw this in my Novell days, I'm seeing some of it now in some Windows users, and I've been seeing it in myself when it comes to Linux usage. By now, continued use of text-mode mail-readers are the result of laziness or identity. As a result, they're not going to change without a lot of convincing.

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(1): In my case, I was working for a company using Novell GroupWise which broke the propagation vector. Still HTML-in-mail, but also dodged those bullets. The smug in Novell circles was mighty those weeks.

(2): Which I understand. I was one for ages.

http://workplace.stackexchange.com/

It's in beta, not released, but kinda right up my alley. I've been giving office-politics advice across the dinner table, conference table, beers, hallway, and the water-cooler for a long time now, and now they have a SE site where that kind of advice is right at home. Awesome. Their scope isn't well defined yet, but this is the kind of place to ask questions that are manifestly off-topic on ServerFault.

Questions like "what methods are useful for convincing a skeptical management that this technical project needs funding?" I've been fighting that fight since 2001, so I have a variety of methods I've used to climb that mountain. It's also the kind of fight that Senior Sysadmins get to have, but can't ask about on SF.

I have hopes for this site.

I also have fears. There are two diametrically opposed forces facing this site:

1. It's aimed at Professionals, who need help navigating workplace issues.
2. The internet isn't as anonymous as it once was, and higher-ups don't take their underlings airing the company dirty laundry on the Internet very well.

The second point rings rather true for me. It is very much not hard to trace this handle back to my real name, and my LinkedIn profile to get a short list of companies I just might be talking about if I ask a question. Once they have my nick associated with my company, suddenly I'm in Corporate Speechistan where it can mean my job if I say the wrong things.

For an example of how this can go bad, take this poor chap. He's stumbled across a co-worker who is potentially thieving company resources, but he isn't sure that's what's happening, and even if it is he doesn't know how to respond. I can say with confidence that none of the managers I've ever worked for would be pleased to see this associated with where I was working, and all of them would be saying, "You really should have come to me with that."

I'm perfectly happy giving advice to people having problems in the office, and I'm even happy to do it on a site as well indexed as the SE sites are. I just won't be asking questions there.

Which is unfortunate. According to their Area51 stats, they're doing excellently well in every metric but question-rate. There is a reason for this.

Inspired from this closed post over on programmers-stackexchange.

Pretty much, for an application that is resource intensive, is going physical a good idea for startups?

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Disclaimer: The application I'm working on right now is such a 'resource intensive' application, and we've gone physical (well, more hybrid) and we're a startup. But sort of not a startup. The company founded way back in 2004ish and the application they built back then didn't have any web presence. Also, it was 2004; the Cloud wasn't even a word yet. Factor in a couple of other issues (like: the cloud vendors at the time couldn't do what we needed them to do) and physical made a lot of sense for us. The answer to this question for an already-existing company that already has a physical-based product but is looking to radically change that product will be different than for a group of four people with a big idea and some cash.

The question of whether or not to stay with what we're doing came up a lot during the building process of our new App, so I've given this issue a heck of a lot of thought. Therefore, I have Opinions about it.

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There is a reason that conventional wisdom for startups is to do it all in the cloud somewhere. Several reasons, actually.

• When you're building a product, it's nigh impossible to predict how much hardware you're going to need so the flexibility allowed by the cloud is extremely attractive.
• If things crash and burn having all of your compute in the cloud means fewer assets to liquidate
• You don't need a hardware expert, just OS-experienced people.
• You don't need to find a location for the hardware.
• If you manage to get a rocket-launch, you can make your infrastructure bigger by throwing money at it a lot faster than you could if you were physical-based.

All very valid reasons.

Before I get into the details, it's important to note that there are three levels of going physical:

1. Renting Servers from a colo or managed services provider. Which is the option the P.SE questioner was asking about.
2. Renting Space from a colo and filling it with your own gear. Which is what we do. But then, even Amazon goes this route.
3. Building your own datacenter on company property. This covers everything from my old job at WWU to Google. And probably Amazon in some regions/AZ's.

There are a few edge cases where cloud becomes less of a good idea, and the P.SE asker has one of them: the application under development works best on configs that the cloud-vendors consider unusual. For instance, if whatever you're doing requires GPU processing, the cloud options for that are rather scanty right now.

The cloud vendors provide virtual server configs for a wide range of use-cases that they believe cover most of expected needs. If whatever you're working on doesn't fit into their idea of "most", then physical begins to look attractive.

Need lots and lots of RAM but not that much CPU horse-power?

Need GPU, or multiple GPU?

Need extremely fast I/O?

Some cloud vendors can handle all of these, but the prices can be rather off-putting. But is it worth it to muck around with physical?

Buying your own servers, configuring them how you need, then shipping them off to an MSP gives you a good environment for your hardware and professional hardware techs when something goes wrong. It still costs, of course, but you get just what you need. It is entirely possible to beat the cloud costs going this route. But, you do lose the flexibility cloud gives you.

Going the route we did, rent space at a colo and install purchased hardware, is something that I'd only recommend when building your production environment. Or if funding isn't an issue, I'd recommend going there early on in the development cycle to start working on deployment issues. This is the option that does need a hardware expert. My company has me, and you can hire people like me either full-time or on a part-time basis through contracting companies. When you hit go-live, you will want full-time coverage though, so plan for that.

Going the self-hosting route is an even more complex decision to make. Plenty of startups began with a few servers in a basement or living-room of someone's house, but that doesn't scale (housemates rapidly become tired of the noise). Building a server-closet in the office (or home-office, such as those startups that began in 2004, ahem) is another route plenty of startups take, but scale issues continue; that closet is going to get hot if more than a few big servers get in there. Going this route means you're also assuming the environmental control aspects of managing computing hardware in addition to the computing hardware itself.

Which is several ways of saying:

If your case is special enough, it can overcome some of the negatives associated with the physical tiers.

Our case is just special enough, if you add in the physical infrastructure we already had.

Someone just starting out won't have that. The special will have to be more special than what we're doing. Only you can figure that out, but there are a few warning signs that you just might be that special:

• Your application requires server builds that are either very expensive, or not present in the cloud providers.
• The regulatory regime you're planning to operate under doesn't trust the Cloud yet.
• You need extremely reliable I/O performance (though this is getting better in cloudistan)
• You need extremely fast I/O performance, such as provided by SSDs.

THEN you may want to go physical!

Or embrace the power of and, go hybrid!

This was posted earlier this year, but I only just ran across it.

http://ryanfunduk.com/culture-of-exclusion/

Summary: Alcohol seems to pervade (javascript) culture. Big boozy events are at every conference, and this is exclusionary.

Is this a problem at Sysadminly conferences?

Systemic sexism is sneaky: you don't always recognize it when you see it, and unless you've had cause to be sensitized by it, you may not recognize when you see it until much after the fact. I had a moment of that when I read this blog-comment on a post covering swag at the Grace Hopper conference. The key quote:

But more seriously, I feel that one of the messages we give girls loud and clear in engineering is that they belong so long as they don't do anything obviously labelled as feminine -- the following things are not done by engineers: wear pink, wearing nail polish, caring about fashion, high heels, carrying a mirror in your purse, sewing things, worrying about walking in the dark.

But its ok for engineers of both genders to do all the things previously labelled as masculine, including: wearing blue, being a fan of men's football and hockey (where grown men beat each other up), drinking beer (and getting drunk), taking a group to play lasertag or paintball (i.e. simulated war), buying big electronics for our offices (beats conserving energy), loving cars and fighter jets, wearing male-sized Tshirts and so on. Now we just relabel all of this as gender-neutral and then on average men have to do nothing at all to fit into the mold of an engineer.

What this triggered was a crystallizing of an idea I had back after the LISA 2011 Women in Tech panel. Which I apparently didn't blog about here, which surprises me (have a link or two elsewhere). During that very excellent panel, one of the topics that got brought up was fitting into a very masculine office-culture. There are a variety ways to do that if you're not of the masculine persuasion, used strategies included embracing your exceptionalism ("I am the only Woman here, and this makes me special"), consciously excluding girly things to better fit in ("I'm just one of the guys, no need to panic"), and stone-headedly ignoring it all together ("I am me, deal with it."). Each of these has their own side-effects when the second and third woman shows up, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

How this blog comment ties into that observation from last year is the message employers give when:

• Their job-posting (or company web-site) proudly claims that good cultural fit is just as important as ability to do the work.
• When the interviewee gets to the interview, finds out the office is entirely male. Or maybe has a single woman in the office.

The message being given to prospective employees, and prospective employees good enough to at least get past the phone interview stage, is  you will have to fit into a very masculine culture if you want to work here, and fit in well. To someone who hasn't picked the I'm-just-one-of-the-guys survival strategy, this is off-putting. Meanwhile, the company in question wonders why they can't attract more female technical staff.

That LISA 2011 panel spent a lot of time on ways employers make the hiring process sexist, and this particular method didn't come up. I really should have noticed it earlier as I have friends who have complained about getting to the later stages of an interesting job interview process before realizing that the corporate culture was going to be too much effort to put up with.

The take-away here is:

Advertising good cultural fit as just as important as (or more important than) technical ability tells prospective employees, we like the cultural mix we have now and are looking for similar people. When that culture contains nothing but a single group (straight, westernized men, for instance), this is an exclusive hiring practice.

This came across Twitter this morning:

Any time I see some pitch about a post-email world I immediately look to see what kind of walled-garden I'm being talked into. Because that's what they're doing.

Yes, email has been around 40+ years now.

Yes, it is based on some truly antiquated standards.

Yes, doing it right requires spending big money on spam filtering.

Yes, there is no inherent organization to email other than timeline.

And yet it still persists, no matter how many up and coming startups or well entrenched nigh-ubiquitous megacorps try and subvert it. It's still there. We all have at least one email address, probably a few. Why has email survived this long when so many other 40+ year old technologies have been dead so long they only show up in CompSci History of Computing courses?

• Email is simple, and helps people communicate.
• Email is extensible, which allows introducing things like filtering, file-transfer, organization, and collaboration, while still working the same way it always has.
  
• Email is platform independent, which means nearly anything can do it; the quintessential open standard.
• Email is everywhere, it's the one messaging system that nearly everyone has access to so people and companies can assume such a messaging conduit exists.
  

It's like talking about a paper-free office, you can cut down on the paper but actually getting rid of it will take a heck of a lot of work.

We may get to an SMTP-free existence at some point, but it's not likely to happen in the next 10 years.