Gabe Monroy

“For Graeber, bullshit jobs carry with them a moral imperative: ‘If you’re not busy all the time doing something, anything—doesn’t really matter what it is—you’re a bad person.’ But the flipside of that logic seems to be: if you actually like doing X activity, if it is valuable, meaningful, and carries intrinsic rewards for you, it is wrong for you to expect to be paid (well) for it; you should give it freely, even (especially) if by doing so you are allowing others to profit. In other words, we’ll make a living from you doing what you love (for free), but we’ll keep you in check by making sure you have to make a living doing what you hate.” — Geoff Shullenberger, a writing professor at New York University I couldn't help thinking that here, the professor is describing, how “open source software” thing works. And then, I found: “The free software industry, perversely enough, has become a paradigm in this respect... software engineering work was divided between the interesting and challenging work of developing core technologies, and the tedious labor of ‘applying duct tape’ to allow different core technologies to work together, because the designers had never bothered to think about their compatibility. ... increasingly, open source means that all the really engaging tasks are done for free.” — David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs

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I've appreciated all the folks who have suggested I look at System Initiative this week. The great thing is, I've been tracking them for a bit now. I've even written about them and the other companies who are changing how we work, for the better. All the Next Wave companies are focused on context, helping teams navigate the current level of complexity, and preparing teams for what comes next. Huge believer in this problem and the companies that are solving it. Including my own. We're like dependabot for your entire technical stack. I don't know if you are aware but unplanned work is a big pain point for our Ops friends and it's only getting worse. So why not start with the small stuff no one has time to get to, Automate that away and give teams peace of mind while reducing toil. Don't worry Security, there will be checks and balances including an audit trail. It'll make staying in compliance a snap! All that to be said, SI's GA announcement is cool, and the approach of moving from a factory to a team. A pipeline to something more organic to manage infrastructure is timely. The team has worked hard and it shows in their GA offering! While you are checking out SI, I'd highly recommend checking out some of the other companies in the Next Wave of DevOps, if you haven't already. The number of companies is growing and the founding teams are passionate about this space and the problems. We are better together and all of the companies are amazing! + Anyshift.io + AppMap + CloudTruth + DryRun Security + Overmind + Prequel.dev + RunWhen + Stakpak + Stanza New companies are making the hard parts more approachable with our complex and ever-growing technical stacks. From code to deployment and everything in between #opservations

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Missed one aspect of writing the TLA+ spec yesterday. How to gain confidence it is correct. https://lnkd.in/dQn2VUUq

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TL;dr - RIP Terraform. Time to say goodbye. I just ran into this obituary for Terraform and Hashicorp. The most probable future seems to be the maximization of sales motion and the minimization of engineering investment - just adding another product to the price list and unleashing the sales force at it. The worst possible outcome would be if IBM decided to make Terraform part of their still-born cloud offering. Or maybe we’ll have Terraform for mainframe? #terraform #hashicorp #ibm #upgrade

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At the core of effective engineering leadership is the ability to stay connected with your team. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect because retaining the respect of your people is difficult unless you remain technically involved yourself. In my journey as an engineering leader, staying true to the individual contributor role that originally earned their respect has kept me close. This approach extends beyond technical expertise; it's about maintaining a deep connection with the core activities that propel product development forward at Gearflow. One of my biggest professional fears is becoming irrelevant or disconnected from my team and our work. This fear motivates me to continually reinvent and retool in response to market demands. Next month, I'll be sharing about my adventures generating synthetic data recently. And while I'm no expert when I start preparing for these talks, the process is incredibly valuable. It's less about delivering a perfect talk and more about how the preparation expands my thinking and exposes me to new capabilities. This helps me connect the dots to opportunities at Gearflow that bring real innovation to our customers. Speaking regularly holds me accountable and pushes me to learn ahead of the curve, ensuring I remain relevant and impactful day-to-day. Every talk is a journey of discovery, helping me to lead with humility, communicate clearly, and inspire a culture of innovation through a deep, technical understanding of our work.

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My #1 management rule that I’ve seen even very senior people get wrong - people’s actions will mostly mirror how you treat them: If you treat devs like children with blinders on they will act like children. If you hide costs from devs they won’t care what things cost. If you don’t have devs on the hook for when things break they won’t care so much about when they break. If you treat office workers as untrustworthy they will act untrustworthy. If you force RTO to keep an eye on people they will waste more time in the office. The tighter you squeeze your fist the more falls through. Thats not to say there aren’t exceptions to this but it’s true in the general case.

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This is very cool to see: "At bitdrift, we have a very different take on observability: on-device intelligence. Instead of sending loads of expensive telemetry data only to later sift through it for a few precious insights, we couple a sophisticated device SDK, local storage, and real-time control via our control plane SaaS, in order to dynamically fetch only the data that is needed in order to understand customer behavior and solve problems quickly. We give you 1000x the observability at 0.01x the cost." https://lnkd.in/gGAiMNvG by Matt Klein

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Large Language Models (#LLMs) are evolving rapidly, and the demand for running them at scale is skyrocketing. #Ollama is stepping up to meet this need with its official container image on Docker Hub, excelling in local #deployments. However, there’s a catch for containerized environments: downloading #models requires the ollama serve command to be running within the #container. This extra step complicates automated deployments via #CI #CD #pipelines, making seamless model access challenging. To take your #model to production, it needs to be #container-ready—a feature Ollama has yet to fully support. The gap in #AIOps for smooth deployments gets blurred with the inference services available as an easy way to take it to production. Goal is to overcome obstacles and deliver solutions 😉 so here is to get you started on having your (O)#llama #production ready in a private #deployment from your #local to #cloud all in #oneshot . Enjoy Medium: https://lnkd.in/g9jqBQ8d dev.to: https://lnkd.in/gi_gGwam #AI #LLM #Ollama #llama3 #phi3 #mistral #S6overlay #AIOps #CI #CD #oneshot #container #docker #podmanEnjoy

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I published my first Spring Boot library to Maven Central! It's a simple Cloudflare Turnstile Captcha integration for your Spring Boot App. Just a small first step, with larger projects coming soon! Check it out! https://lnkd.in/gtXgnHq4 #springboot #cloudflare #captcha

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🎃The October issue of #CheckpointChronicle is now out 🌟 It covers Ververica's Fluss, #ApacheFlink 2.0, Iggy.rs, Strimzi's support for #ApacheKafka 4.0, tons of OTF material from Jack Vanlightly, Christian Hollinger's write up of ngrok's data platform, nice detail of how SmartNews use #ApacheIceberg with Flink and #ApacheSpark, a good writeup from Sudhendu P. on #ApachePolaris, notes from Kir Titievsky 🇺🇦 on Kafka's Avro serialisers, and much more! https://lnkd.in/djc-HERy

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An eye-opening piece on the "Observability Cost Crisis" by bitdrifts Matt Klein. It suggests a major shift in how we handle logging, metrics, and traces to curb the spiraling costs. The idea? . . . . . . . . . . . . Default to storing no telemetry data unless specifically identified as needed on the fly. While this sounds radical, the argument is that recent advancements in infrastructure AI/ML can make it a reality. #CloudEngineering #Infrastructure #Observability #SaaS #CostEfficiency

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Is your observability bill out of control? Are you wasting engineering time trying to justify the cost? There's a better solution… https://hubs.la/Q02PsJZM0 #kubernetes #devops #cloud #observability

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Yesterday was National TV Dinner Day, and during a conversation with Christian Hernandez, we stumbled upon a funny (but true) realization: frozen TV dinners are a lot like upstream open-source dependencies. 🍽️💻 ° There’s always a lot of choices—like the countless frozen meals in the freezer aisle, open-source packages are everywhere. But not all are created equal. Some are just... not great—ever picked a dependency that looked good on paper but turned out to be a buggy, poorly maintained mess? Yeah, like that frozen dinner that tastes like cardboard. 🤦‍♂️ ° Within a given box, there’s always something you don’t love—maybe it’s the unnecessary features, the complexity you don’t need, or the way the package interacts with your stack. It’s like when your frozen meal comes with mushy veggies you can’t toss without breaking the meal. ° It’ll keep you relatively satisfied—these packages do their job, and you can get your project up and running. Not fancy, not perfect, but it works... for now. 🍴 ° But it could also make you sick—the real danger is the unknown. A poorly maintained dependency could introduce security vulnerabilities, create performance issues, or break down with an unexpected update. One small glitch, and suddenly your whole system feels like it’s got food poisoning. 😷 And here’s the kicker: ° You seldom find pickles in the box—frozen dinners (and dependencies) rarely come with that perfect something to jazz things up. You almost always need to bring your own “pickle”—that little something extra, like custom code, patches, or special tweaks to make it really sing. In the world of software, just like TV dinners, it's all about choosing carefully, being prepared to discard what you don’t need, and always having your own “pickles” on hand to add a bit of flair. What’s your strategy for navigating the ups and downs of upstream dependencies? #NationalTVDinnerDay #opensource #softwareengineering #devlife #dependencies #softwaredevelopment #pickles #LinkedInLunacy

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Microservices get a bad rap due to complexity and high TCO. A lot of that is because a microservice-based application works the same way as a bunch of dominoes falling. If one misses, or falls out of order, the whole workflow stops. And you have no control over the process once your microservices start ping-ponging events and RPC's back and forth. That's why #microservices are so expensive to manage. Great blog post below by Colt McNealy about how LittleHorse can solve those problems. Give it a read. https://lnkd.in/gJECBwRu

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🌩️ Is Terraform Enough for SaaS Infrastructure? Not quite. 🌩️ While Terraform is a powerful tool for provisioning infrastructure, it faces limitations when scaling for multi-tenant SaaS needs. From lack of tenant-awareness and ACID compliance to challenges in day-2 operations, multi-cloud management, and SaaS-native support—there are significant gaps. Omnistrate aims to address the IaC gaps in SaaS by providing a native solution that also enhances your existing Terraform setup with these capabilities—no modifications needed. Explore more about why traditional IaC falls short and how Omnistrate bridges the gap for B2B SaaS: https://lnkd.in/d45uMaPY #SaaS #Infrastructure #Terraform #CloudNative #DevOps #Omnistrate

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This is a great paper from the Confluent team for those interested in building large-scale, cloud-native platforms. It's rare to see this level of detail shared by cloud providers. https://lnkd.in/eGYJ-NZz #kora #korapaper #confluent

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I'll be speaking at GOTO Chicago on performance techniques in Jepsen. It's gonna be a weird collage of parallelism, pure functions, immutable data structures, and deforestation with low-level techniques like bitsets, avoiding sharing between threads, packing structures into mutable arrays, dynamic compilation of primitive boxes, and macro iteration magic. October 21 & 22nd. https://lnkd.in/d3yedtc6

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CockroachDB 24.1 is here! I'm excited about this release because 241 is the older of the twin primes 239 and 241, but most importantly because we built this release for organizations who need to reduce operational complexity, enhance developer productivity, and keep their data secure and resilient. We made migrations simpler, with improved SQL compatibility as well as updates to our migration tool MOLT Fetch. If you’re still running on a legacy database and want to make the leap, CockroachDB can help support your cloud-native migration. We designed this release so you can spend less time on database management and more time building. CockroachDB 24.1 features enhanced support for UDFs, Stored Procedures, Read Committed transactions, CDC Google Cloud Pub/Sub, Azure Event Hub, and our CockroachDB Cloud Terraform Provider. We didn’t forget about resilience or security either. Cloud clusters are now officially backed by a SLA of 99.999%. You can organize roles and permissions with Folders and increase security controls with support for GCP Private Service Connect. And Self-Hosted customers can use Physical Cluster Replication with fast cutback to reduce risk from major incidents or disasters. This post is just scratching the surface of the impressive work the Cockroach Labs team has done in making this release possible, so dive into the blog below for an in-depth look at what’s new. https://lnkd.in/efwZCwr9 

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I'll be speaking at GOTO Chicago next Tuesday, 2024-10-24, on JVM performance techniques in Jepsen: https://lnkd.in/dZWviHim Jepsen is a Clojure library for testing distributed systems correctness. We'll talk about how Jepsen records and analyzes histories of up to a billion operations with the help of a new file format, faster lazy and persistent data structures, bit-packing, memory-adaptive caching, associative folds, and thread-safe transactional executors. Come learn about some of the lesser-known corners of the JVM and how to write faster, more efficient programs in any language. This talk will benefit intermediate to advanced engineers interested in performance optimization, parallelism, and medium-sized datasets, while also offering insights valuable to both beginners and senior engineers.

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