I don’t even know where to start with this one. So many updates…

Tidal

I’ve been using Tidal more than Spotify for a few months now and I’m intrigued by the higher quality audio and its possibilities.

One idea is to build a hifi system using Tidal with Dolby Atmos. Not sure how I’d justify this one with the missus yet. It’s a lot of speakers and kit. Any way about it, I also need something to play my vinyl records on that sounds a bit better.

Am I Writing a Book?

One random day this summer, I had a funny 5 minutes. I thought - most of the books I’ve read about my “trade” suck a bit. They’re usually written by people that wear suits and ties and aimed junior engineers. What I’d like to see is one written by someone who works for a living and aimed at senior engineers.

So - I decided I’d like to write a book about DevOps and Platform Engineering that I would like to read. A title quickly came to mind: “DevOps and Platform Engineering Supremacy”.

Having no idea where to start, I went to ChatGPT, told it the title and sort of book I wanted to write, how it should target senior engineers instead of juniors, and prompted it to: Give me around a 13 chapter titles with possible topics, plus a prologue and epilogue, each covering the most important aspects of devops, platform engineering, and SRE work - taking into considering the questions you’re most asked by highly skilled engineers.

And it gave me this:

• Prologue: The Stewards of Systems

• Infrastructure as Code – From Pets to Cattle to Immutable Legos

  Terraform, modularity, drift management, testing IaC, platform maturity

• CI/CD Pipelines and the Art of Flow

  Delivery velocity, release hygiene, trunk-based dev, ephemeral environments

• Cloud-Native Patterns and Platform as a Product

  Kubernetes, service meshes, API gateways, platform UX and team enablement

• Code Review, GitOps, and Developer Experience

  Shifting left, review culture, GitOps tooling, secrets and policy as code

• Security Engineering in DevOps Pipelines

  Supply chain integrity, SBOMs, vulnerability scanning, secret scanning, OPA

• Observability, SLOs, and Root Cause Thinking

  Metrics vs logs vs traces, RED/USE/SLOs, incident response, postmortems

• Resilience Engineering and Failure Injection

  Chaos engineering, graceful degradation, progressive delivery, blast radius

• Multi-Cloud and Hybrid Complexity

  Trade-offs, cost modelling, control planes, data gravity, networking pain points

• Cost Engineering and Environmental Impact

  FinOps, sustainable compute, rightsizing, green ops, serverless vs reserved

• Skills, Hiring, and the Future of the Profession

  What senior engineers must learn next, hiring with AI, mentoring in LLM era

• Secrets Management and Identity Federation at Scale

  Vault, AWS IAM, OIDC, workload identity, cloud-native auth and rotation

• Compliance as Code and Risk Reduction

  PCI/GDPR/SOC2 automation, cloud security posture management, drift detection

• Internal Developer Platforms and Golden Paths

  Backstage, scaffolding templates, paved roads, documentation as UX

• Epilogue: Sustaining Supremacy

Sounds interesting maybe? That’s as far as I went with ChatGPT. I’ve finished the Prologue, and started writing the Infrastructure as Code chapter. All in all, this may take a year and even if I don’t publish it, I can at least have it printed and bound for myself. It’s also a great way to refine my own skills and knowledge.

On The Health Front

This old chestnut again.

The first MRI on my hips showed nothing wrong at all! So I got referred to a spinal team who checked me out, and had me do another MRI to see if I have a disk pressing on a nerve somewhere. That won’t be back for another 5 weeks. In the mean time, the hip pain’s running a little bit lower - but I feel like someone’s burning me permanently with one of those old car cigarette lighters in the middle of my back. I don’t know if that’s better or worse. :-(

Travel

Myself and the missus flew off to Tennessee for 3 days and we drove to Lynchburg to visit the Jack Daniels distillery, went to the Grand Ole Opre, and went bar crawling one night in downtown Nashville to listen to some great live music. I love Nashville. It would have been great to visit properly whist my dad was still alive.

After that, we drove down to Fort Worth, Texas. Met up with my eldest daughter and her partner, and then drove back to Home Home in Odessa, Texas. Had a good week there before returning home. This time my brother and I were tasked with cutting down a number of trees, installing a new sink, the usual clearing out of the gutters, along with a first - rebuilding the bottom of a door frame where the concrete and cinder block had been damaged by water over the years. No one should be hiring us as concrete contractors any time soon, but we got the job done.

New Swag

I’ve developed an interest in DJI’s audio and video kit, and have purchased myself a DJI Mic Mini, and the brand new DJI Osmo 360 camera.

We’re off to Cornwall this long weekend so no doubt I’ll have a play with the camera and try posting some of the video here.

I also spotted a Jackery Explorer 1000 v2 Portable Power Station on sale at 50% off, so had one of those away for camping, prepper, and entertainment purposes. I might end up with a matching solar panel too before long.

Other Random Stuff

• At work I’ve been digging deep into Dynatrace and observability. It’s interesting but there’s like zero chance I’d recommend it to anyone else. Too expensive, too complex, and too badly documented. Stick with open source!

• The new Google Pixel 10s came out. I was thinking about getting a Pixel 10 Pro Fold, but I’m struggling to justify the cost versus the features versus my needs. Frankly, I don’t need a new phone. My Pixel 9 Pro XL is flawless. That all said, The Pixel 10 Pro XL looks like a beast and I can get a nice chunk taken off the price if I trade in my Pixel 9 Pro XL. So, I might just do it.

• I think I mentioned in my midsummer update that I got fed up with paying for Adobe Creative Cloud and tried switching to Affinity Photo. I liked it but, quickly realised it was a good replaement for Photoshop - but not for Lightroom. So, in the end, I went to Darktable for my photo management and editing. It’s a bit of a learning curve, but I think it’s going to be worth it.

• Did I mention that I’m writing that book in LaTeX? I am! I also rewrote my CV from scratch in LaTeX, saved it in Github, and then used GitHub Actions to automatically build a PDF and DOCX file every time I push a change. It’s geeky as hell but pretty cool.

• I’m thinking about building a flat-bar gravel bike from parts.

As always, you can add my RSS feed to your reader of choice and if you made it this far thanks for reading!

Chris