I owe my career to Unidata

Posted on by
1

You may wonder how a site called “Funnel Fiasco” came to have so much technology content. It all traces back to an email I sent my freshman year of college. But it’s also directly attributable to the work done at Unidata. Funded by the National Science Foundation for decades, Unidata is a cornerstone of atmospheric science education, providing software and data services. Tragically, Unidata furloughed almost all staff on Friday thanks to the assholes running the government.

A fateful email

Early in my freshman year, Dr. Jon Schrage was giving a tour of the Earth & Atmospheric Sciences facilities in Purdue’s Civil Engineering Building. (Ed note — Earth & Atmospheric Sciences is now Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. The Civil Engineering Building is now Hampton Hall. I will use the names as they were in my time as an undergraduate.) He mentioned that he’d be doing a training on the WXP software soon if anyone wanted to learn how to use it.

Reader, I very much did. So I showed up to the Civil Engineering Building on a Wednesday night. For the next two hours, I learned how to use WXP to make weather maps. At the end of the session, Jon mentioned that he was a visiting professor and his appointment was up at the end of the year. He didn’t know who would be maintaining the software the following year.

When I got back to my room, high on the thrill of weather plots, I sat down and sent him an email. With all of the confidence of a mediocre white man, I sent this: “I’m just a freshman who doesn’t know what he’s doing, but I’ll do it.” It’s been almost 24 years, but I’m pretty sure those were my exact words.

Did I know how to use Unix (specifically FreeBSD)? No! Did I know anything about the software? No! Was I going to let that stop me? Absolutely not.

Amazingly, the department hired me. That got me through my undergraduate years and set me up to accidentally fall into a career in technology. I’d say it has worked out pretty well so far.

Where Unidata fits in

The astute reader may notice that so far the tale centers on my overconfidence. So where does Unidata fit in?

Unidata created and maintains the Local Data Manager (LDM) software. LDM allows universities and other users to reliably share meteorological data in near-real time. From models, to observations, to satellite images, to radar data, LDM provides a robust transport mechanism. A big part of my job was administering the software and providing help to students and faculty who needed data.

The department flew me to Boulder for an in-person training workshop where I learned LDM in greater depth. Later on, I returned to Boulder for training on GEMPAK, another weather visualization and analysis suite.

The software and the training helped me become a valuable contributor my department’s education and research missions. This is what led to me getting a full-time Linux sysadmin role the summer after I graduated. No doubt there are many others like me out there — not to mention all of the forecasters and researchers who learned about the atmosphere with the help of Unidata’s work.

The Unidata staff — as well as so many other federal grant recipients, contractors, and employees — deserve far better than this administration has given them.

Other writing: April 2025

Posted on by
Reply

What have I been writing when I haven’t been writing here?

Kusari

  • Securing the Software Supply Chain book now available! — This new book from Michael Liberman and Brandon Lum (edited by yours truly!) guides you from the basics of supply chain security through to being a security expert.
  • The future of CVEs — Recent funding concerns have highlighted the need for a more resilient system of vulnerability identification.

GUAC

R.I.P. Skype

Posted on by
1

Microsoft pulled the plug on Skype yesterday. I haven’t used it in years. I even took it off of my phone at some point. Even though I was never a particularly heavy user, I still feel a bit of sadness about it.

I first became aware of Skype in (I guess) 2007. A PhD candidate in my department was defending his dissertation, but one of his committee members was from another institution. Instead of flying to West Lafayette for a two hour engagement, they joined in via Skype. As someone who grew up with sub-standard-even-for-dialup dialup Internet, this was pretty wild.

It’s not that I couldn’t conceive of high-bandwidth voice and video communication, it’s just that I hadn’t experienced it before. I didn’t really use it much myself until Mario Marathon, when we’d talk to Internet randos and famous people.

For a while, I used Skype to keep in touch with some of those Internet randos, but my Skype usage really took off when I joined Cycle Computing. When I started in 2013, we were using Skype for voice as well as chat. It was not great. Thankfully, this app called Slack launched in 2014. It didn’t have voice or video chat, so we still used Skype for that (until we switched to Zoom some time later).

By the time Microsoft acquired Cycle (which was well after they acquired Skype), they had developed Teams. My division, though, still used Skype for Business, which wasn’t Skype at all but a re-branded Lync.

From then on, I almost never used Skype. The only person I’ve Skyped with in the last 8 years or so is my wife before we lived together. It’s been years now since I’ve even logged in.

So long, Skype. You could have been awesome, except you were ignored.

Book review: Guiding Star OKRs

Posted on by
Reply

Setting, tracking, and reporting OKRs is terrible. But what if it wasn’t? In Guiding Star OKRs: A New Approach to Setting and Achieving Goals, Staffan Nöteberg lays out a framework that focuses on heading in the right direction instead of trying to meet exact targets. Unlike the OKRs you may have experienced, Guiding Star OKRs are focused on getting the right results, not the pre-determined results.

In a previous role, management was big into setting cascading OKRs (which Nöteberg says not to do). My objectives were my manager’s key results. My manager’s objectives were my VP’s key results, and so on. The end result was that there was no reward for helping colleagues meet their individual OKR targets. Instead of working together, we all worked individually in the hope that it ended up achieving the company’s broader goals. Spoiler alert: it did not.

I went into reading Guiding Star OKRs expecting to shake my head at a slight variation on a broken system. Instead, I came away enthusiastic about Nöteberg’s approach. Finally, OKRs that are meaningful!

The concept of setting and attracting objectives and key results (OKRs) really took off a Google. As anyone in the sysadmin/DevOps space in the early 2010s can tell you, a lot of organizations copied Google without considering if they need to.

This book is full of practical advice and examples to help the reader adopt the framework to their organization’s specific needs. For example: “never engage in setting objectives or key results when tasks are already determined.”

Guiding Star OKRs is a must-read for leaders who want to achieve results in a sustainable way. It’s now available in print and digital formats from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Full disclosure: I provided the publisher with a praise quote for this book and received a complimentary copy as a result. I received no compensation for this review.

Book review: Business Success with Open Source

Posted on by
Reply

Open source is big business, whether you mean companies producing open source software or using it to build their products. But too many companies don’t take an intentional approach to how they consume and create open source. There’s no excuse for that now that VM Brasseur’s new book, Business Success with Open Source: Strengthen Your Business with Free and Open Source Software, is published.

At 470 pages, this is no light treatment of the topic. Brasseur digs deep into the intersection of business and open source software with insights from her years of experience. Readers who are already deep in the open source world may find the early chapters unnecessary, but Brasseur ensures that no one gets left behind.

If you’re in a leadership role in your company and have anything to do with open source at all, you need to read this book. It’s now available in print and digital formats from The Pragmatic Bookshelf.

Full disclosure: VM Brasseur is a close personal friend. In addition, I was a technical reviewer for this book and received a complimentary copy for my work. I received no compensation for this review.

Other writing: March 2025

Posted on by
Reply

What have I been writing when I haven’t been writing here?

Kusari

Duck Alignment Academy

GUAC

Highways routed around towns

Posted on by
2

“Don’t you think,” one of George Minafer’s unnamed compatriots asks in The Magnificent Ambersons, “that being things is rather better than doing things?” Minafer and his crowd are not the most sympathetic characters, and I don’t think Booth Tarkington intended them to be (although Minafer could arguably be considered an exaggerated avatar of his creator in certain respects), but I think there’s something to this quote.

I thought about it on a recent drive to Fort Wayne, where the Hoosier Heartland Highway in all its four-lane divided highway splendor curves around several small towns. Americans, it seems, would rather get to places than go to places. By this, I mean the journey is something to make as short as possible, not a part of the experience.

I’m no highway engineer, but every time I’ve driven the Hoosier Heartland Highway, the traffic has been almost non-existent. There seems to be very little reason for the “upgrade”, other than to let people drive faster. And as a result, there are towns that people no longer drive through. This might be good for the driver, but it seems less good for the businesses in the towns, and perhaps for us as a society.

When I drive through small towns, I sometimes wonder how much longer they have. The population of Americus, through which Indiana 25 no longer passes, has fallen from 630 in 2012 when the Hoosier Heartland Highway opened to 57 in 2023. Some of this is part of a general trend, to be sure, but not all of it.

Are we really in such a hurry that we’re willing to give up unique places in exchange for the sameness of limited-access highways with the same fast food places at every exit? Probably. I’m guilty of it myself. But there’s a lot we’re missing out on that we might not get back when it’s gone. We could do with spending more time being and less time doing.

Baseball and me in 2025

Posted on by
1

Once again borrowing from Chris O’Donnell, I thought I’d write about my relationship to baseball in 2025.

Like many American boys, I grew up playing Little League baseball. I loved the game, even though I was decidedly bad at it. When I got to the age where I’d be on the more competitive traveling teams, I retired. Instead, I helped out as an assistant coach and scorekeeper for my younger sisters’ softball teams.

My family would go to a couple of AAA games in Louisville most years and I’d watch the All Star Game and World Series on TV usually, but that was about it. I was decidedly a casual fan. It didn’t help that “my” team was 600 miles away, which means 1. we definitely were not going to see a home game and 2. they weren’t on TV basically ever.

Reader, have I ever told you the story of how I became an Orioles fan? Again, like many American boys, I collected baseball cards. Like boys who only had sisters, I often wished I had a brother. So when I ended up with baseball cards for brothers Cal, Jr. and Bill Ripken and they played for the same team I was enthralled. Not long after that, Cal, Jr. broke Lou Gehrig’s consecutive game stream, and I was hooked for life.

So given that the Orioles have been really good the last few years and that I can easily watch most of their games online, you might think I’d be a more engaged fan. Well…I’m not.

Baseball invites a casualness that I don’t get from most other sports. The slowness of the game itself that some complain about is a feature to me. You can sit back, have a conversation, drink a beer or two, and just let the world go by for a bit. And MLB plays 162 games a year, so it’s okay if you miss one or ten.

I’ve tried playing in fantasy baseball leagues, but I just don’t get into it enough to do well. And my life is busy enough that watching more than the occasional game on TV is difficult. So as the 2025 baseball season starts, I’ll mostly catch up on the Orioles via the blogs I read and maybe I’ll sneak in a game here and there. I’ll keep going to the Lafayette Aviators games because they’re cheap and local. Baseball, like most sports, is better experienced in person.

DevOpsDays Chicago 2025 recap

Posted on by
Reply

On Tuesday, I drove up to Chicago for the DevOpsDays event there. I’d never been to one, but they gave me a nice discount after rejecting my talk proposal, and it’s only a few hours, so I decided “why not?” I’m not really in the DevOps space anymore (to the degree I ever was), so I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. But the good news is that I was!

The DevOpsDays Chicago yak and its handler.
The DevOpsDays Chicago yak and its handler.

First, though, I want to tell you about a little DevOops I had. The bathrooms in the venue are fancy. They have bottles of mouthwash and little disposable cups for people who want to have minty fresh breath. I only discovered this after I washed my hands. I reflexively reached for the bottle on the counter and scrubbed dutifully. Then I realized my hands were minty fresh. I was sure to use the soap the rest of the day.

The morning had several good talks. Reid Savage gave a talk called “anti-devops.” They included such concepts as “transparency is bad,” “silos are good,” and “stop shipping iteratively.” While that might sound contrarian, it was not. Reid’s point was more of “you can have too much of a good thing.” They were the source of my favorite notes:

Transparency without clarity is bad. “I really need to pee” is providing transparency. “Do you see a bathroom nearby?” is providing clarity.

Paul Czarkowski gave a talk about running private AI on home infrastructure. He was mostly able to do live demos, which is always a risky proposition. He also said something that I want to tattoo on a lot of people’s foreheads: “Anytime you ask an AI a question, you need to be able to think critically about the response.”

The final full-length talk of the morning came from Annie Hedgpeth. Her talk explained professional networking with an analogy to systems networking. Like her, I’ve found that the relationships are more important to my career than the technical problems I’ve solved. As she said, “Like disaster recovery, professional relationships are an ongoing practice, not an emergency response.”

Just before the lunch break, there was a series of ignite talks. These are short talks with auto-advancing slides. I have a lot of speaking experience, but the thought of doing an ignite talk gives me a sense of dread. I have a ton of respect for anyone willing to get on stage and deliver a talk of any quality, but these were all good. I bought a copy of Robert Snyder’s Innovation Portfolio because I was intrigued by his “five verbs” concept. Expect a Duck Alignment Academy post on that someday.

After lunch, we had open sessions. I proposed one on supply chain security that I called “the next log4shell happened and I do or do not know what to do next.” I also attended one on reusable workflows (do they make us dumber?) and one on communicating with executives. All three had great conversations.

On top of all of the great professional content, I was also able to spend a few minutes catching up with a couple of folks I haven’t seen since the Before Times. It was great to see Jamie and Matty again. Hopefully it won’t be half a decade until the next time.

Ben and Matty taking a selfie.
Ben and Matty taking a selfie.

This was the 10th DevOpsDays Chicago, and I’m looking forward to the 11th. Now that I have a better sense for the vibe, I’m motivated to tweak my proposal and give a future event a try. Perhaps Des Moines or Detroit later this year?

“The Dress” and shared reality

Posted on by
Reply

For the better part of the last decade (and perhaps longer), we’ve struggled with the fact that not everyone is living in the same reality. Political polarization is, in my view, less about reasoned differences in policy preferences and more about the fact that we’re not working from the same set of facts. Nothing I can say will convince someone who believes that a secret cabal is trafficking children in the basement of a pizza restaurant. Or more banally, that Joe Biden shut down the country at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

We recently passed the 10th anniversary of “The Dress,” which some say is the start of all of this.

The Dress was the end of objective reality as we knew it, imo

— amy brown 💫 (@amybrown.xyz) 2025-03-13T13:19:59.216Z

Was literally talking to a friend about this last night. The majority of what went viral before The Dress went viral because it reflected some kind of consensus — this is good, this is interesting, this is relatable. After The Dress, virality was permanently changed into a measurement of conflict.

— Ryan Broderick (@ryanhatesthis.bsky.social) 2025-03-13T13:22:55.128Z

The day of The Dress, I was interviewing for a job. I wasn’t allowed to have my phone at the facility, so I was offline most of the day. When I got to the airport, I had a chance to catch up on work and also the Internet. I’ll admit that I was a lot more interested in the llamas running loose in Arizona than some photo of a white and gold (don’t @ me) dress.

“The Dress” was definitely a shared experience for those of us terminally online in 2015. Whether it’s the event that tore us apart or not is harder to say. It does seem to mark a turning point, but the same could be said for the deaths of David Bowie and Harambe in 2016.

Instead of a beginning, The Dress might be an end. I see it as the end of shared experiences. With so many entertainment options, we don’t have things like the final episode of “M*A*S*H” or “Seinfeld” to have a shared experience. And maybe that’s part of the reason we don’t have a shared reality.