historynops's comments

historynops | 1 year ago | on: OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork

My question is, how do Env0, Spacelift, and other Terraform automation and collaboration tool vendors make money if they make OpenTofu so good that it's preferred for 95% of folks out there? Do they fight over the support money scraps?

historynops | 1 year ago | on: Cloudflare R2 IA storage tier

A fairly unrelated point, but its so strange how companies that underpin a lot of the internet struggle in the stock market. While we all wish we had sold our tech stocks in 2021, Cloudflare still hasn't recovered.

historynops | 3 years ago | on: How We Use Terraform At Slack

A lot of the things they've built on and will maintain through (I imagine) many engineering hours, are already features in Terraform Cloud. The implementations in TFC are better than the competitors as well.

historynops | 3 years ago | on: Implementing a Zero Trust Architecture

The problem with "implementing a zero trust architecture" is that it's framing an ongoing process as an end state. You'll see the same disappointment that people saw when they decided "we're going to do DevOps".

I thought that "Shift Left" was going to be the new DevOps buzzword for security groups, but I liked that because it implied an ongoing process, not a "we're going to become perfect and fix this once and for all".

Google's BeyondCorp - the precursor to zero trust architecture - said you need to secure three things: users, devices, and application policies. Your security teams are probably already aware of many of good tools available to secure the users and apps, but the device security piece has very weak tooling even today. You may have heard of MDM software. No one wants to use it.

historynops | 3 years ago | on: About 200 years ago, the world started getting rich. Why?

"The simplest answer is that economic growth occurred only after the rate of technological innovation became highly sustained. Without sustained technological innovation, any one-off economic improvement will not lead to sustained growth."

I'm also thinking about the future here and even with a deceleration of innovation, as long as more countries start declining in birth rate, it still means better standard of living for the rest of us. Population growth can drive an economy, but it also eats up the money flowing out to people.

Of course there's also the very-unequitable distribution of wealth in societies to consider too.

historynops | 4 years ago | on: China has a fateful choice to make

It doesn't seem like a fateful choice, unless they think Russia might go nuclear (bad for everyone). Assuming they don't, Russia just becomes more economically dependent on them and they have a new vassal state. When two superpowers become so economically dependent on them, they can pretty much do what they want.

historynops | 4 years ago | on: “Open source” is broken

"everyone rushes to support a project the moment it hits the news, that's not sustainable."

This is exactly how a lot of things function, especially in government and disasters. So apparently it is sustainable. It's just not ideal, but this element is always going to be a part of human nature as our collective consciousness can only focus on fixing a few things at a time.

historynops | 4 years ago | on: A pitch deck that is music to the ears

A great book about the prodigiousness of Max Martin and other Swedish producers: "The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory". Lots of industry tales about artist who did and didn't take the advice of their producers. Kelly Clarkson, for example, stopped taking Max Martin's advice after her breakout album and slowly declined with fewer recognizable hits.

The theme: Hits can't be planned or predicted. It's a numbers game where you keep trying to make a large number of them and eventually something breaks through.

historynops | 4 years ago | on: Nomad vs. Kubernetes

Kubernetes native secrets management is not very good, so you're going to end up using Vault either way.

historynops | 4 years ago | on: Explaining explaining: a quick guide on explanatory writing

> What will get you ahead is, instead, the ability to be convincing. That is, to pry people loose from their existing beliefs, and nudge them to adopt beliefs of your choosing. This, perhaps surprisingly, does not involve explaining your beliefs and hoping other people see the error of their ways. People don’t work like that.

Can you give an example of writing that does this? Is it more about making declarations (with sources I hope) to nudge the reader to your beliefs? I'm not sure how you convince intelligent people without some explanations.

historynops | 4 years ago | on: Explaining explaining: a quick guide on explanatory writing

100% the right takeaway. Even if it's just a couple of sentences of encapsulating "what I'm going to talk about", that should always come before starting into a long backstory.

I read a lot of blogs that make that mistake of starting off a post by droning on for paragraphs about the background, history, or context they want to set for the blog — but I need to know why I'm here in the first place. The title got my attention, but it still doesn't totally tell me what I'll get out of this.

A 'history of a problem' section also has to try and be concise and use really engaging language (it's hard) otherwise those background intros can feel like a chore to read and people will leave.

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