I wrote in a previous article about how I tend not to notice immediately that, somewhere like, for example, a tech conference has, say, 300 men and six women in it, because I innately think of people as people, and not divide them by gender or race or age or whatever. And I was thinking about why this is, and I realised I have my father to thank for...

A subject that's been talked about increasingly over the last few months is burnout among IT workers. There was a large and positive response to Stephen Nelson-Smith's presentation on the subject at Devopsdays Tel Aviv in October 2013, and again to Mike Preston's ignite talk at Devopsdays London in November. They were both roundly praised for their...

Emacs macros are amazing. I was editing a document today, which started off as a list of sentences which I wanted to convert into numbered headlines, followed by some boilerplate text. Let's suppose the list looked like this: this is the first thing this is the second thing this is the third thing What I wanted to do was convert this to: 1) this...

Note: This article was originally published in 2011. In response to demand, I've updated it for 2014! Enjoy! SNS Imagine you have a fairly complicated infrastructure with a large number of nodes and roles. Suppose you have a requirement to take one of the nodes and rebuild it in an entirely new network, perhaps even for a completely different organization....

Last month marked the 21st anniversary of the programming language Ruby. I use Ruby pretty much all the time. If I need to write a command line tool, a web app, pretty much anything, I'll probably start with Ruby. This means I've always got Ruby to hand on whatever machine I'm using. However, in practice, getting a recent Ruby on any platform isn't...

Ben Hughes (@benjammingh) of Etsy, visiting from SF to speak on security, tells me he is horrified by the pitifully small number of women at the conference. He says he thought New York was bad 'til he saw London. I saw, maybe, six female persons here, among several hundred male ones. Personally I don't notice this much - and if I don't experience any...