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How does OpenAI compare versus a penguin in the role of a legal secretary? Let’s see… import openai import os from dotenv import load_dotenv, find_dotenv _ = load_dotenv(find_dotenv()) # read local .env file openai.api_key = os.getenv('OPENAI_API_KEY') def get_completion(prompt, model="gpt-3.5-turbo", temperature=0): messages = [{"role": "user", "content": prompt}] response = openai.ChatCompletion.create( model=model, messages=messages, temperature=temperature, ) return response.choices[0].message["content"] prompt = f""" Translate the following letter from a legal firm to a delinquent client, Fred 'The Cincinnati Strangler' Johnson, from hostile slang to a friendly business letter: 'Attention criminal pervert: Where the hell is my dough, you twisted goon? Don't forget who got you sprung on that technicality. I want the money. Now. P.S. Have you strangled your wife yet, psycho-brain?' """ response = get_completion(prompt) print(response) Dear Mr. Johnson, We are writing to follow up on the outstanding balance on your account. As your legal representatives, we were able to assist you in your legal matters and we kindly request that you fulfill your financial obligations to us promptly. Please be advised that we require payment as soon as possible. We appreciate your attention to this matter and look forward to receiving your payment promptly. Thank you for your cooperation. Sincerely, I still have to give it to Opus by a flipper, mainly for the P.S., but OpenAI got into the right general headspace! And it’s too hot here in Texas for me to keep a penguin around to translate what I want to say into more acceptable terms, and I sure get tired of doing it. I miss my old Eudora email client that would put little hot peppers next to my email if it thought it was too spicy… View the full article

A recent project delay at work put me in mind of this recurring issue I’ve seen with a lot of agile teams. That is, reluctance to call something a blocker. Karthik and I are working on a new revision of our LinkedIn Learning courser “DevOps Foundations: Lean and Agile” so I decided to dig into this a bit. I think many engineers believe a blocker is “something that prevents me from doing any work whatsoever on this entire project.” This in my experience leads to a lot of project delays and unaddressed issues because something was not identified and communicated widely enough to be swiftly resolved. This is unfortunately encouraged by some Agile wonks who start hairsplitting with terms. “Well, there’s a blocker and then there’s an impediment,” they say. As I google this, it turns out you can differentiate between “delays, impediments, blockers, and roadblocks. Oh, and dependencies.” And boards, reports, etc. have to do/in progress/done and blockers, not 10 other categories. Here’s the deal. Most teams out there are not formally trained on PM or agile and have essentially figured out what they know via osmosis. And there’s one term they even vaguely understand, which is “blocker”. (I have never seen a team distinguish formally between blockers and impediments in decades of doing this.). While I love wordplay as much as the next person, I don’t think this attempt to categorize bad things on the infinite spectrum of bad things is practical, and best belongs as an organic explanation of the impact. Does it prevent you from proceeding on that piece of work? On any work? You can proceed on it but it can’t become done until the thing is resolved? Or it doesn’t technically stop work but it does put the project a week behind? Sure, say it. It’s important to know the impact but it does not change the nature of the existence of an issue and the need to swarm on or escalate it. The practical definition of a blocker from a team member level is “anything not entirely in my control that is stopping or delaying work now or in the very near future.” The practical definition of a blocker from a management point of view is “anything that is getting in the way of the team that I need to know about or do something about.” We have to go back to the entire reason to have a term like “blocker”, which is to allow the team, or failing that their management escalation, to resolve issues that prevent the continued timely flow of work. Period, end of story, if process definition hairsplitting isn’t serving that core goal then do what does. Definition people love to say something’s not “technically a blocker – yet.” “Well not having a cloud accout to use as the required test fixture isn’t technically a blocker because I won’t need it for another two days, even though there’s been no obvious headway on the request we made to IT for it.” Can anyone seriously contend that’s not a blocker? It’s a problem that is clearly visible on the road ahead, you don’t have to run into it first like my cheap Roomba does in order to escalate it, and doing so is antithetical to the overall agile goal of ensuring smooth and continuous flow. I don’t tolerate “technically true” when it becomes “wilfully dumb.” Underlying this seems to be some unstated assumption that blockers are “bad” and you are bad for having one or reporting one. And I get it, there’s plenty of bad scrum masters/managers/etc. out there that operate unthinkingly on some Neanderthal level and react as “person say thing I don’t like, person is bad.” (Or the modern tech bro Neanderthal who has some variation of this like “well I need to discourage people from reporting blockers to make them use their masculine energy to pull themselves up by their bootstraps blah blah.”) Sure, toxic people can drive any process off track, that shouldn’t be the default however. I believe in a healthy Agile environment team members should be encouraged to bring up anything threatening to slow or stop work. It can be a small thing, but it creates an opening for help from the team. Even “I haven’t used this tool before and it’s taking a little longer and I am not sure I’ll get this task done by sprint end” – that’s an opportunity for someone to hop on for a half hour to pair with you or train you. If you’re off schedule there’s some blocker around, whether it can be handled in the team or needs escalation. You don’t have to escalate everything, though even if the team handled it, schedule or other impacts need to be communicated. For escalations, make it clear it’s an escalation and who to, don’t just assume everyone who gets a status report will seize on all the blocker lines as to dos. “Blocker: No headway on Azure text fixture, it’s needed to complete our work this sprint and will delay us if it’s not in place in 2 days – @ernest we need your help with this one” is perfect. As someone providing oversight for a lot of sprint teams working on consulting engagements often with client-prescribed milestone deliverables, I keep getting into situations where a sprint full of reporting “no blockers” suddenly turns into “well but of course we won’t have any of the deliverables at sprint end tomorrow.” That makes everyone unhappy, especially me if it’s something I could have urged the client or an external team to provide for the team more promptly. Give people the opportunity to intervene to keep you on track! I’m going to start adding “definition of blocker” right after “definition of done” in kickoff discussions because of how chronic this issue is – I venture to say I’ve seen it everywhere, it’s just more tolerated in environments where schedules aren’t taken too seriously. Let me know how you handle this issue, if you encourage a wide definition of blocker, and your experiences on this! View the full article

This came up today at work and I realized that over my now-decades of cloud engineering, I have developed a very specific way of using tags that sets both infra dev teams and SRE teams up for success, and I wanted to share it. Who cares about tags? I do. They are the only persistent source of information you can trust (as much as you can trust anything in this fallen world) to communicate information about an infrastructure asset beyond what the cloud or virtualization fabric it’s running in knows. You may have a terraform state, you may have a database or etcd or something that knows what things are – but those systems can go down or get corrupted. Tags are the one thing that if someone can see the infrastructure – via console or CLI or API or integrated tool – that they can always see. Server names are notoriously unreliable – ideally in a modern infrastructure you don’t reuse servers from one task to another or put multiple workloads on one, but that’s a historical practice that pops up all to often, and server names have character limits (even if they don’t, the management systems around them usually enforce one). Many powerful tools like Datadog work by exclusively relying on tags. It simplifies operation and prevents errors if, when you add a new production app server, that automatically gets pulled into the right monitoring dashboards and alerting schemes because it is tagged right. I’ve run very large complex cloud environments using this scheme as the primary means to drive operations. Top level tag rules: Tag everything. Tagging’s not just for servers. Every cloud element that can take a tag, tag. Network, disk images, snapshots, lambdas, cloud services, weird little cloud widgets (“S3 VPC endpoint!”). Use uniform tags. It’s best to specify “all lower case, no spaces” and so on. If people decide to word a tag slightly differently in two places, the value is lost. Both the key and the value, but especially the key – teach people that if you say “owner” that means “owner” not “Owner” and “owning party” and whatever else. Don’t overtag with attributes you can easily see. Instance size, what AZ it’s in, and so on is already part of the cloud metadata so it’s inefficient to add tags for it. Use standard tags. This is what I’ll cover in the rest of this article. At the risk of oversimplifying, you need two things out of your systems environment – compliance and management. And tags are a great way to get it. Compliance Attribution! Cost! Security! You need to know where infrastructure came from, who owns it, who’s paying for it, and if it’s even supposed to be there in the first place. Who owns it? Tag all cloud assets with an owner (email address) basically whatever is required to uniquely identify who owns an asset. Should be a team email for persistent assets, if it’s a personal email then the assumption should be if that person leaves the company those assets get deleted (good for sandboxes etc). The amount of highly paid engineer time I’ve seen wasted over the last decade of people having to go out and do cattle calls of “Hey who owns these… we need to turn some off for cost or patch them for security or explain them for compliance… No really, who owns these…” is shocking. owner:[email protected] Who’s paying for it This varies but it’s important. “Owner” might not be sufficient in an environment – often some kind of cost allocation code is required based on how your company does finances. Is it a centralized expense or does it get allocated to a client? Is it a production or development expense, those are often handled differently from a finance perspective. At scale you may need a several-parter – in my current consulting job there’s a contract number but also a specific cost code inside that contract number that we need all expenses divvied up between. billing:CUCT30001 Where did it come from Traceability both “up” and “down” the chain. When you go look at a random cloud instance, even if you know who it belongs to you can’t tell how it got there. Was it created by Terraform? If so where’s the state file? Was it created via some other automation system you have? Github? Rundeck? Custom python app #25? Some tools like Cloudformation do this automatically. Otherwise, consider adding a source tag or set of tags with sufficient information to trace the live system back to the automation. Developers love tagging git commits and branches with versions and JIRA tickets and release dates and such, same concept applies here. Different things make sense depending on your tech stack – if you GitOps everything then the source might be a specific build, or you want to say which s3 bucket your tfstate is in… Here as an example, I’m working with a system that is terraform instantiated from a gitops pipeline so I’ve made a source tag that says github and then the repo name and then the action name. And for the tfstate I have it saved in an s3 bucket named “mystatebucket.” source:github/myapp/deploy-action sourcestate:s3/mystatebucket When does it go OK, I know the last two sound like the lyrics to “Cotton-Eyed Joe”, which is a bonus. But a major source of cost creep is infrastructure that was intended to be there for a short time – a demo, a dev cycle – that ends up just living forever. And sure, you can just send nag-o-grams to the owner list, but it’s better to tag systems with an expires tag in date format (ideally YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM as God intended). “expires:never” is acceptable for production infrastructure, though I’ve even used it on autoscaling prod infrastructure to make sure systems get turned over and don’t live too long. expires:2025-02-01-00-00-00 or expires:never Management Operations! Incidents! Cost and security again! Keep the entire operational cycle, including “during bad production incidents”, in mind when designing tags. People tear down stacks/clusters, or go into the console and “kill servers”, and accidentally leave other infrastructure – you need to be able to identify and clean up orphaned assets. Hackers get your AWS key and spin up a huge volume of bitcoin miners. Identifying and actioning on infrastructure accurately and efficiently is the goal. As in any healthy system, the “compliance” tags above aren’t just useful to the beancounters, they’re helpful to you as a cloud engineer or SRE. But beyond that, you want a taxonomy of your systems to use to manage them by grouping operations, monitoring, and so on. This scheme may differ based on your system’s needs, but I’ve found a general formula that fits in most cases I come across. Again, it assumes virtual systems where servers have one purpose – that’s modern best practice. “Sharing is the devil.” EARFI I like to pronounce this “errr-feee.” It’s a hierarchy to group your systems. environment – What environment does this represent to you, e.g. dev, test, production, as this is usually the primary element of concern to an operator. “environment:uat” vs “environment:prod”. application – What application or system is this hosting? The online banking app? The reporting system? The security monitoring server? The mobile game backend? GenAI training? “application:banking”. role – What function does this specific server perform? Webserver dbserver, appserver, kafka – systems in an identical role should have identical loadouts. “role:apiserver” vs “role:dbserver”. Keep in mind this is a hierarchy and you won’t have guaranteed uniqueness across it – for example, “application:banking,role:dbserver” may be quite different from “application:mobilegame,role:dbserver” so you would usually never refer to just “role:dbserver.” flavor – Optional, but useful in case you need to differentiate something special in your org that is a primary lever of operation (Windows vs Linux? CPU vs GPU nodes in the same k8s cluster? v2 vs v2?). I usually find there’s only one of these (besides of course region and things you shouldn’t tag because they are in other metadata). For our apiserver example, consider that maybe we have the same code running on all our api servers but via load balancer we send REST queries to one set and SOAP queries to another set for caching and performance reasons. “flavor:rest” vs “flavor:soap”. instance – A unique identifier among identical boxes in a specific EARF set, most commonly just an integer. “instance:2”. You could use a GUID if you really need it but that’s a pain to type for an operator. This then allows you to target specific groups of your infrastructure, down to a single element or up to entire products. “Run this week’s security patches on all the environment:uat, application:banking, role:apiserver, flavor:rest servers.” Once you verify, you can do the same on environment:prod.” “The second of the three servers in that autoscaling group is locked up. Terminate environment:uat, application:banking, role:apiserver, flavor:rest, instance:2“ “We seem to be having memory problems on the apiservers. Is it one or all of the boxes? Check the average of environment:prod, application:banking, role:apiserver, flavor:rest and then also show it broken down by instance tag. It’s high on just some of the servers but not all? Try flavor:rest vs flavor:soap to see if it’s dependent on that functionality. Is it load do you think? Compare to the aggregate of environment:uat to see if it’s the same in an idle system.” “Set up an alert for any environment:prod server that goes down. And one for any environment:prod, application:banking, role:apiserver that throws 500 errors.” “Security demands we check all our DB servers for a new vulnerability. Try sending this curl payload to all role:dbservers, doesn’t matter what application. They say it won’t hurt anything but do it to environment:uat before environment:prod for safety.” So now a random new operator gets an alert about a system outage and logs into the AWS console and sees not just “i-123456 started 2 days ago,” they see owner:[email protected] billing:CUCT30001 source:github/myapp/deploy-action sourcestate:s3/mystatebucket expires:never environment:prod application:mobilegame role:dbserver flavor:read-only instance:2 That operator now has a huge amount of information to contextualize their work, that at best they’d have to go look up in docs or systems and at worst they’d have to just start serially spamming. They know who owns it, what generates it, what it does and has hints at how important it is. (prod – probably important. A duplicate read secondary – could be worse.) And then runbooks can be very crisp about what to do in what situation by also using the tags. “If the server is environment:prod then you must initiate an incident <here>… If the server is a role:dbserver and a role:read-only it is OK to terminate it and bring up a new one but then you have to go run runbook <X> and run job <y> to set it up as a read secondary…” Feel free and let me know how you use tags and what you can’t live without! View the full article

Bruce Springsteen | Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images Rock icon Bruce Springsteen and his iconic E Street Band have made the difficult decision to postpone the remaining dates of their 2023 world tour due to the singer’s ongoing battle with peptic ulcer disease. In a heartfelt statement released on Wednesday, the New Jersey native explained that the postponed shows would be rescheduled for 2024. This latest announcement follows a previous postponement in September, when Springsteen first began experiencing symptoms related to peptic ulcer disease, a condition involving open sores in the oesophagus, stomach, or small intestine (ouch). Bruce Springsteen – ‘Turn Back the Hands of Time’ After originally planning to reboot the tour this November, the 74-year-old legend will now be dedicating the rest of the year to focusing on treatment and recovery, as advised by his medical team. Springsteen and the E Street Band unveiled their highly anticipated 2023 international tour last year. The tour c9kicked off in Florida in February and saw them perform a string of shows across North America, before embarking on a European leg during the summer months. Unfortunately, the tour hit an unexpected roadblock as the band were forced to postpone seven more shows in the US and Canada due to Springsteen’s health struggles. In a press statement, The Boss expressed his regret, particularly to the fans in the US city of Philadelphia, where he had to cancel a performance a few weeks out. He promised to reschedule the dates, saying: “Over here on E Street, we’re heartbroken to have to postpone these shows. First, apologies to our fabulous Philly fans who we missed a few weeks ago. We’ll be back to pick these shows up and then some. Thank you for your understanding and support. We’ve been having a blast at our US shows and we’re looking forward to more great times. We’ll be back soon.” Get well soon, Boss man. No Aussie dates are on the itinerary at this time, but we’ll keep you updated if that changes. Further Reading September 23 to Officially Become Bruce Springsteen Day in New Jersey Gladys Knight, Bruce Springsteen to Receive National Medals of Arts from President Joe Biden The Stories Behind the Covers on Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Only the Strong Survive’ The post Bruce Springsteen Postpones Shows to Get Treatment for Peptic Ulcer Disease appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Vanessa Amorosi | Credit: AWMA Official Facebook The Australian Women In Music Awards have wrapped up for another year, taking over Brisbane/Meanjin for a night of celebrating the achievements and contributions of women across the local music industry. Among the highlights of the 2023 event at the Tivoli on Wednesday night, iconic singer Kate Ceberano, jazz/folk artist Jeannie Lewis and drummer Clare Moore all picked up prestigious Lifetime Achievement Awards, while Toni Watson (AKA Tones and I) scooped the big Songwriter Award. Tones And I – ‘THE GREATEST’ Elsewhere, pop, soul and R&B Ashli was awarded the Emerging Artist gong, and RedHook singer Emmy Mack copped the event’s inaugural Women In Heavy Music Award. While a surprise trophy was also awarded to one of the performers of the evening after being kept hush-hush by the AWMA’s, with Australian pop royalty Vanessa Amorosi being handed the inaugural AWMA Inspiration Award. “AWMA has raised the collective voice – demanding equitable access, safety, and recognition for women in the Australian music industry,” AWMA Founding Executive Producer & Program Director Vicki Gordon said in a statement. “We support and promote women as vital, essential contributors to the future business growth of the sector and are calling on the industry to adopt Gender Equality as a Core Music Industry value. Gender equity is still a long way in the future and we all need to remain vigilant.” The 2023 AWMA Awards ceremony will be streamed on ABC iview tomorrow night, Friday, 29th September and broadcast on ABC TV this Saturday 30th from 4pm. In the meantime, you can peep the full list of winners down below. Australian Women In Music Awards 2023 Winners Artistic Excellence Award Jessica Mauboy Beccy Cole Vika & Linda – WINNER Creative Leadership Award Claire Edwardes – WINNER Sharni Honor Chelsea Wilson Diversity in Music Award Ruth O’Brien Cerisa Benjamin – WINNER Ripple Effect Band Emerging Artist Award Ashli – WINNER Jem Cassar-Daley Merinda Dias-Jayasinha Excellence in Classical Music Award Jenny Duck-Chong Celia Craig – WINNER Anne Cawrse Inaugural ARIA Executive Leader Game Changer Award Nazlican Eren Emily Collins – WINNER Sophie Galaise Filmmaker Award Philippa Bateman Amy Louisee Triana Hernandez – WINNER Inaugural Women In Heavy Music Award Emmy Mack – WINNER Jelena Goluza Amy Simmons Humanitarian Award Andrea Smith Alison Hams – WINNER Gemma Farrell Lifetime Achievement Award Jeannie Lewis – WINNER Clare Moore – WINNER Kate Ceberano – WINNER Live Creative Production Award Nikki Nouveau Naomi Price – WINNER Sarah Ponturo Live Production Touring Award Karen-lee Herrmann Jenny Moon – WINNER Stacey Queffert Music Journalist Award Tait McGregor Stephanie Eslake Jane Gazzo – WINNER Music Leadership Award Marianna Annas – WINNER Mary Jo Capps AM Beth Appleton Music Photographer Award Ruby Boland Lucinda Goodwin Mia Mala McDonald – WINNER Songwriter Award Sarah McLeod Tanya Batt Toni Watson (Tones And I) – WINNER Studio Production Award Candice Lorrae Robyn Lee Payne – WINNER Elise Reitze-Swensen Inspiration Award Vanessa Amorosi – WINNER Further Reading Performers Announced for National Indigenous Music Awards 2023: Barkaa, Thelma Plum, Budjerah + More Flume, RÜFÜS DU SOL and Sampa the Great the Big Winners at the 2023 APRA Music Awards King Stingray Win the 18th Australian Music Prize The post Australian Women In Music Awards 2023 Winners Announced appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

tiffi | Credit: Minori Ueda Music Feeds’ Love Letter to a Record series asks artists to reflect on their relationship with the music they love and share stories about how it has influenced their lives. 20-year-old Taiwanese-Australian pop artist tiffi heaps praise on Bright Eyes’ landmark indie-folk LP, I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning, released in 2005. Suburban pop musician tiffi has released dating pool, the follow-up to her 2021 debut EP, growing pains. The new EP was made with the executive oversight of LA producer City Girl. “For me, this EP is healing,” tiffi said in a statement. “I’m putting it out there that I fucked up, a lot. I didn’t make the best decisions, I wasn’t always kind, other people fucked me over, I fucked them over. It’s a part of life and that’s okay.” Check out the EP’s latest single, ‘bored’, at the bottom of this page. tiffi’s love letter to Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning tiffi: Six years ago, I was 14. I sat in my bedroom recording a cover of ‘Lua’ into my phone with my three-quarter size, $100 guitar, singing in a horrendous indie girl drawl that I cringe at listening to now. I uploaded the cover onto my Soundcloud, which had maybe a thousand followers. I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning is, I think, the beginning of many indie singer-songwriters’ journeys. It was the precursor to my love for Big Thief, Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. I own the CD for this album – of course – and I put it on when I feel a sense of longing or when I want to feel the feeling of what it’s like to walk home in the dark, unafraid of who or what is behind me. The record starts with ‘At the Bottom of Everything’, with a spoken prologue about a woman who is on a plane that’s tanking. Conor Oberst sips his coffee and speaks to the audience and I never, ever, skip this part of the song. It gives me chills. To me, it’s a joyful celebration of relief juxtaposed with the bleakness that at the bottom of everything, we aren’t important. “I’m happy just because / I found out I am really no one.” I love the lift where Oberst sings, “While my mother waters plants / My father loads his gun.” I feel like this song really shaped my understanding of the world. I am not scared to die, and it brings me peace to think there will be an end. The start of ‘Old Soul Song (for the New World Order)’ makes me think of Phoebe Bridgers, and then Oberst’s beautiful, shaky voice comes in. This imagined coup – “There were barricades to keep us off the street / But the crowd kept pushing forward / Till they swallowed the police” – makes me feel a triumphant feeling of a new beginning. I have daydreamed so many times of being new, showing people I’m different and I’ve changed, and for an overturning of myself – to be transformed, improved, and to one day recount my chaos, misfortune and pain like this song does. ‘Lua’ was the first song I discovered on this record and I remember how profoundly it affected me. How beautiful and intimate it felt. It was like a friend to me, just guitar and voice, and it showed me that I didn’t need anything else to tell an amazing story and for it to resonate with others. This song built so much of what my music is, and I hold it so dear to me. I love how unspecific yet personal the lyrics are on this record. You can’t tell exactly what it’s about but the feeling is so, so familiar, like when Oberst sings, “Don’t be fooled / No, don’t get lied to / Love was always cruel […] It happened to me / Now it’s happening to you” in ‘Train Under Water’. ‘First Day Of My Life’ is really special to me, too. If ‘Lua’ is nighttime, ‘First Day Of My Life’ is daytime. It has so many sweet lines, like “This is the first day of my life / I’m glad I didn’t die before I met you.” I can only hope to find a love as pure and hopeful as that. “I’m literally crying writing this and listening to the songs” – tiffi Many of Oberst’s lyrics on this record talk about transportation – being someone else, somewhere else, a new world – which has resonated with me so deeply through the years. He communicates the feeling of being stuck in lines like, “Dream about a train that’s gonna / Take me back to where I belong,” in ‘Another Travelin’ Song’. My favourite line from that song is, “I will find my fears and face them / Or I will cower like a dog […] I’ll fight like hell to hide that I’ve given up.” I could go on and on about how much I love every song. How he sings so solemnly in ‘Landlocked Blues’ and ‘Poison Oak’, and the feeling that ‘Road to Joy’ gives me. This album was my first love. It taught me so much about life and kept me warm when I was cold. I’ve cried many, many times listening to it. And I’m sure I will continue to. P.s. My fave line is, “I could have been a famous singer / If I had someone else’s voice / But failure’s always sounded better / Let’s fuck it up, boys – make some noise.” tiffi – ‘bored’ Stream and purchase tiffi’s new EP, dating pool, right here Further Reading SXSW Sydney Invites Public Along to Music Festival, Announces More Artists Bright Eyes Announce 2023 Australian Tour Bright Eyes Share Elliott Smith Cover Feat. Phoebe Bridgers The post Love Letter to a Record: tiffi on Bright Eyes’ ‘I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning’ appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Hooper Crescent | Credit: Clara Slewa Melbourne/Naarm rhythmic new wave combo Hooper Crescent will release their second LP, Essential Tremors, on Friday, 23rd February via Spoilsport Records. The album’s angular lead single, ‘Late Night TV’, is out now along with a playful and supremely silly music video from director Seamus Murphy – watch that below. Hooper Crescent – ‘Late Night TV’ Hooper Crescent worked on Essential Tremors with engineer and producer John Lee, whose credits include Laura Jean, Lost Animal and The Stroppies. It was a significant step up from the low-budget recording process that gave rise to the band’s 2020 debut, Object Permanence. “We wanted to see what direction our sound would take working in a more polished studio environment for our second album,” said singer and guitarist Sam Cummins. “We really emphasised the rhythmic/new wave qualities of our music, and pushed our sound into exciting new areas we could never have achieved ourselves.” Cummins is joined in Hooper Crescent by keys player Kate Allan, guitarist Ian Ngo, bass player Gemma Helms and drummer Ash Stirling. Sam Lyons, of Naarm art-punks Eggy, played saxophone on the new album, while Jooyoung Kim is responsible for the excellent album cover. Take a look at the cover art and pre-order the album here. Further Reading Magic Dirt Release Cover of The Saints’ ‘(I’m) Stranded’ Squid Nebula Announce Debut LP, Release New Single ‘From Here to You’ NEW AUS MUSIC PLAYLIST: Our Favourite Tunes Of The Week The post Hooper Crescent Announce New Album, Share Video for ‘Late Night TV’ appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Pash | Credit: Elizabeth Canli Music Feeds’ Love Letter to a Record series asks artists to reflect on their relationship with the music they love and share stories about how it has influenced their lives. Sydney/Gadigal land indie pop outfit Pash give praise to Broadcast’s definitive third album, Tender Buttons, released in 2005. Pash released the three-song EP Skylight in August 2023. The follow-up to 2021’s Somersault – which was reissued on Dinosaur City Records in 2022 – the new EP explores concepts of self-delusion, neediness and escapism through the lens of jangly guitar pop. Stream the EP in full at the bottom of this page. Pash on Tender Buttons Pash: Dear Tender Buttons, There’s a lot of power in places you return to, which over time become a safety net. We can go away for a while, listen to other albums, return to you and feel at ease. There’s a balance that’s drawn us to you and kept us returning again and again. Your curious balance between song-y songs and little fragments. Fragments you can follow, get lost in and take your time finding your way back. The balance in your textures. Somehow you mesh those vibraphone chimes, sawtooth synths and plucked guitars together. The curiouser space to breathe amidst all that. We love returning to you and the impression you leave. Jackson & Jemimah – Pash Pash: Skylight Skylight by Pash Further Reading Pash Sign to Dinosaur City Records and Reissue Debut EP ‘Somersault’ bodies’ ‘song for new light’ is an Intimate Love Song for Many Voices Deuce Lift the Veil on Their New Album ‘Wild Type’ The post Love Letter to a Record: Pash on ‘Tender Buttons’ by Broadcast appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Golden Plains 2023 | Credit: Juliette Younger The ticket ballot has officially opened for Golden Plains, which will return to the Sup’ for its 16th edition in 2024. You can sign up to subscribe and enter the ballot here. As usual, there are two sections to the ballot – one for existing subs and one for newcomers – and ticket offers will be sent out in mid-October, and again in early November. You have until Monday, 16th October to enter. Golden Plains 2024 will take place from Saturday, 9th to Monday, 11th March. Organisers note that it’s the “same size, same shape, no commercial sponsors, free range camping, BYO everywhere, the No Dickhead Policy, One Stage Fits All The Gold”. Carly Rae Jepsen: ‘Surrender My Heart’ The lineup is set to be announced in a few weeks – in 2023 it featured artists like Four Tet, Angel Olsen, Carly Rae Jepsen, Methyl Ethel, Andrew Gurruwiwi Band, and Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. Read our review of the festival here. Golden Plains sister festival Meredith will get underway in early December. The lineup was revealed in August: Kraftwerk, Caroline Polachek, Alvvays, Flowdan, Alex G, and Eris Drew & Octa Octa will all be making the trip to regional Victoria. Meredith Music Festival takes place from Friday, 8th to Sunday, 10th December. Further Reading Meredith Music Festival 2023: Caroline Polachek, Alex G, Kraftwerk + More Golden Plains Review – A Festival of Supernatural Kindness A Guide to Every Australian Music Festival Happening in 2023/24 The post The Ballot for Golden Plains 2024 is Now Open appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Chet Faker | Photo by Andrew Benge/WireImage Western Australian festival Out of the Woods has unveiled the full set times for its upcoming event in early October. The festival hosts three stages – the Woodland, Sunshine, and Little Bird stages. The main live acts will perform on the Woodland stage, while Sunshine is devoted to electronic artists. Broods, Northeast Party House, and ‘Sweet Disposition’ hitmakers The Temper Trap will close the festival on Saturday night, while DMA’s, Skegss, and Chet Faker will hit the stage on Sunday. On the Sunshine stage, KLP and Homopolitan will headline Saturday and Sunday, respectively. Boy & Bear: ‘Strange World’ Out of the Woods has relocated to Fremantle this year, taking over Esplanade Park in Fremantle on Saturday, 7th and Sunday, 8th October. Aside from the artists mentioned above, there’ll be sets from Montaigne, Winston Surfshirt, Meg Mac, Django Django, Boy & Bear, Kinder, Kita Alexander, Ruby Fields, Slumberjack, Stace Cadet, Dulcie, Rabbit Island, Pond‘s Shiny Joe Ryan and more. It’s the second edition of the festival, which describes itself as being “fiercely proud Western Australian owned and operated”, having launched in 2022 with Angus & Julia Stone, Ball Park Music, Hermitude, and The Jungle Giants. See the full set times below; Out of the Woods takes place on Saturday, 7th and Sunday, 8th October. Out of the Woods Set Times 2023 Saturday, 7th October (Click to expand) Sunday, 8th October (Click to expand) Out of the Woods 2023 Boy & Bear Broods (NZ) Chet Faker Django Django (UK) DMA’S Kinder Kita Alexander KLP Late Nite Tuff Guy Meg Mac Montaigne Northeast Party House Ruby Fields Skegss Slumberjack Stace Cadet The Temper Trap Winston Surfshirt Adoration Station Angie Colman Chela Claudie Joy Clove Dulcie Finn Pearson Get Down Club Grunge Barbie Homopolitan Humble Armada Jeff’s House Loveshovel Ningaloo Records Paige Valentine Project Bexx The Psychotic Reactions Ra Ra Viper Rabbit Island Shiny Joe Ryan & the Sky Dolphins Smoked Trout Smol Fish UK Hun Dates & Venue Saturday, 7th and Sunday, 8th October – Esplanade Park, Fremantle Tickets on sale now. Further Reading Ocean Alley, Django Django and Thelma Plum Lead Wanderer Festival 2023 Lineup Earl Sweatshirt, Lil Tjay Lead Yours & Owls 2023 Lineup A Guide to Every Australian Music Festival Happening in 2023/24 The post Set Times Announced for Out of the Woods Festival 2023 appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

triple j Hottest 100 Triple j have launched a competition to find the artwork for the next Hottest 100. It’s the first time the station has opted to crowdsource the artwork. Entries are open now and will close at midnight on Monday, 2nd October. To enter, you’ll need to send your design to [email protected], along with a short explanation (300 words maximum) about who you are and what inspired your design. The winning artwork will be showcased on all Hottest 100 related things at triple j and ABC – including being emblazoned on the t-shirt. Flume: ‘Say Nothing’ The winner will also take home $3,000 cash. You can read through all the terms and conditions of the competition on the website. “Triple J has always been about giving a platform to creativity: from backing in new Australian music and unearthing the brightest emerging talent to getting Dr. Karl to answer some of your truly warped questions,” triple j manager Lachie Macara said in a statement. “We’re looking forward to having our inbox flooded with designs by up-and-coming artists from right around the country.” The Hottest 100 of 2023 will take place at the end of January next year. Flume and MAY-A took out the top spot in 2022 countdown with their collaborative track ‘Say Nothing’. Further Reading Triple J’s Hottest 100 of 2022: 100-1 All The Trivia, Facts, And Broken Records Of Triple J’s Hottest 100 of 2022 ABC Chairman Allegedly Claimed Government Would Cut Funding If Triple J Moved The Hottest 100 Date The post Triple J Launches Competition to Create Hottest 100 Artwork appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Four Tet | Photo by James Manning/PA Images via Getty Images Four Tet will play a one-off headline show in Melbourne tonight, Thursday, 28th September, at the Timber Yard. The show was announced by promoters We Are Novel yesterday, who revealed the producer would be doing a four-hour set at the venue. Tickets went on sale yesterday and quickly sold out – but you can join the waitlist through the link below. Four Tet – real name Kieran Hebden – is currently on tour with Listen Out, which kicked off last weekend in Brisbane and Perth. Four Tet: ‘Baby’ The festival – which also hosts Skrillex, Ice Spice, JPEGMAFIA, and Lil Uzi Vert – concludes in Melbourne and Sydney on Friday, 29th and Saturday, 30th September, respectively. Four Tet was also recently announced on the lineup for Sydney’s Summer Dance Series. The long-running series, promoted by Astral People, will return to the Entertainment Quarter in Moore Park this year for the first time since 2019. The producer will play a set at Summer Dance on Saturday, 30th September, alongside acts like Jyoty, Evie, and Ben Fester. Four Tet Melbourne Headline Show Thursday, 28th September – Timber Yard, Melbourne Sign up to the waitlist here. Further Reading Four Tet, Jyoty & More Announced For Astral People’s Newly Revived ‘Summer Dance’ Series Astral People Announce the Return of Sydney Party Series, Summer Dance Lineups Announced for Listen Out & Listen In 2023: Skrillex, Lil Uzi Vert, Ice Spice & More The post Four Tet Announces Melbourne Headline Show appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Obongjayar | Credit: Salome Tresizé UK-based Nigerian musician Obongjayar has released his second solo single of 2023. ‘Who Let Him In’ follows May’s ‘Just Cool’. In August, Obongjayar guested on Fred again..’s ‘adore u’. Listen to ‘Who Let Him In’ below. Obongjayar – ‘Who Let Him In’ The fast-paced electronic rhythms of ‘Who Let Him In’ are a contrast to the relatively laidback funk sound of ‘Just Cool’. “This one is for the underdogs,” Obongjayar said in a statement. “I feel like my journey in this thing has been about the underdog fighting my way through, cutting my way through. Somehow still here, all the doors shut in my face. If you feel like me, this one is for you.” Obongjayar has won fans across the globe over the past half-dozen years, drawing influence from Afrobeats and electronic soul music. He released his debut album, Some Nights I Dream of Doors, in 2022. His past collaborators include Little Simz, Jeshi, Giggs, Pa Salieu, Kojey Radical and more. Obongjayar was in Australia in June 2023, performing at Melbourne’s Forum for RISING festival and Sydney’s City Recital Hall. He also stopped by Triple R FM for a performance on the station’s flagship program Live at Triple R. Check out a live version of ‘Just Cool’ from the broadcast. Further Reading Squid Nebula Announce Debut LP, Release New Single ‘From Here to You’ NEW AUS MUSIC PLAYLIST: Our Favourite Tunes Of The Week DJ Shadow Flips an Obscure Sample Into an 80s R&B Joyride on ‘You Played Me’ The post Obongjayar Toasts the Underdogs on New Single ‘Who Let Him In’ appeared first on Music Feeds. View the full article

Today, DryRun Security, came out of stealth as the co-founders James Wickett (me) and Ken Johnson (@cktricky) launched the company. To the readers of The Agile Admin, you’ll know that I post about security and its connection with devops from time to time. We launched the company because the arc of the industry has created silos where legacy security solutions have been geared towards security professionals rather than those who write the software. This leads to three significant gaps. The first is testing for security issues after it’s been deployed leads to wasted developer and security team cycles when problems are discovered. The second is many of the bugs being identified are not even relevant, resulting in false-positives. Finally, the third is application security teams lack an accurate picture of which code reviews require their expertise. This is further exacerbated by the sheer velocity and number of daily and weekly code updates. All of these problems lead to inaccurate, delayed, and often incorrectly prioritized security testing and ultimately , an overall less-secure codebase. DryRun Security fixes the disconnect between security and developers by performing Contextual Security Analysis which runs where developers work. As a developer writes code, they dry-run security testing and analysis and get results back in near real time, which is where the name “DryRun” comes from. This type of testing builds the security context of the code and provides feedback to developers whenever they make changes or write new code. “The disconnect between engineers and security testers is due to a lack of security context making it back to developers” said James Wickett, CEO and Co-Founder of DryRun Security, “DryRun Security was created to address this fundamental disconnect under the assumption that developers truly care about the security of the products they are building. With that assumption, we believe that security should be an integral part of the software development process. That’s why it’s our mission to provide engineers with a tool that makes it easy to identify and fix potential security bugs while the developer is working on that section of code.” “At DryRun Security, we understand that once a developer can see the security context of their changes, they can make better decisions and create more secure applications. This is different from the way that testing has been happening over the past two decades which has made fixing bugs inefficient, driving up costs and creating unnecessary hurdles for developers and security professionals.” Said Ken Johnson, Co-Founder and CTO of DryRun Security. “I experienced these headaches firsthand, which is why I started DryRun Security with James. Our belief is that the solution we provide will give developers the ability to integrate contextual security analysis into their development workflow and fix issues before they become bigger problems.”DryRun Security is currently running a private beta for their product, and they are accepting signups to the list. Please visit https://dryrun.security to signup and join the early access list. Link to the full Press Release View the full article

“What is my manager’s deal, anyway?” Here’s some career advice that can help you build a more effective relationship with your manager. Remember, they may be a manager but they don’t know everything, or everything that you do, and they are navigating work and life with just as much trepidation as you are! If you haven’t been a manager, it’s sometimes hard to understand why they’re doing what they are and how to best work with them to make both of you happy. So you want to figure out how to “hack” your manager by managing up! For many years I treated my managers as random-weird-request generators, and frequently worked at cross-purposes with them. until I got advice on managing up and it helped my career. Managing up, or managing your manager, is an important skill that can contribute to a more productive and positive work environment. Here are some key pieces of advice to effectively manage up: Understand your manager’s priorities and expectations: Take the time to understand your manager’s goals, preferred communication style, and expectations. Ask them if it’s not obvious! This knowledge will help you align your work and approach accordingly, or at least find a happy medium. (Feel free and tell them the same about you!) Managers usually have a very specific reason for why they’re asking for something and why they are stressing the things they’re stressing; understanding why is the key to understanding them. Build a strong relationship: Develop a positive and professional relationship with your manager. Be proactive in seeking feedback, understanding their working style, and demonstrating your commitment to achieving shared goals. Our managers try to share the context of what needs to happen with everyone so that they can go do it with autonomy, so reflecting your understanding of and commitment to what’s going on at a high level helps them empower you. If you can help them achieve their goals via a plan you put together, it prevents them needing to “micromanage” by also dictating how to get there. Communication is key: Maintain open and regular communication with your manager. Keep them informed about your progress, challenges, and any important updates. Be clear, concise, and respectful in your communication, and adapt your style to match your manager’s preferences – remember they have a bunch of people they are trying to wrangle to understand the state of a lot of projects. Anticipate needs and be proactive: Try to anticipate your manager’s needs and take proactive steps to address them. Take initiative, suggest solutions to problems, and offer assistance when appropriate. Show that you are capable of working independently and taking ownership of your responsibilities. Make clear asks: Your manager is there to get you what you need to do your job and be happy and healthy. But everyone is different. They don’t know how you prefer to get recognized, or what kind of projects you want to work on, or resources you think you need to be successful… So tell them! They should be trying to figure it out by asking you too, but “communication is hard” and people often make assumptions based on a given situation or communication that may or may not reflect your needs. Provide solutions, not just problems: When you encounter challenges or issues, avoid simply presenting the problems to your manager. Instead, propose potential solutions or alternatives. This demonstrates your critical thinking and problem-solving skills, and it lightens the burden on your manager by offering actionable suggestions. If you don’t have a good solution to a specific issue it’s fine, but sometimes a manager can become dismissive of someone who “just complains all the time” because it adds work to a limited time without any help. Seek and act on feedback: Actively seek feedback from your manager on your performance and areas for improvement. Be open to constructive criticism and use it to grow and develop professionally. Demonstrate your willingness to learn and make necessary adjustments based on the feedback received. Manage your time effectively: Prioritize your tasks, set clear goals, and manage your time efficiently. This will help you meet deadlines, deliver quality work, and reduce the need for constant supervision. Ask if priorities or timings aren’t clear. Your manager dearly wants everyone to be able to do their own thing without any intervention but is held responsible by upper management for outcomes and project schedules/profitability. Be a team player: Collaborate and foster positive relationships with your colleagues. Support your teammates, share knowledge, and contribute to a cooperative and harmonious work environment. Show that you can work well with others and contribute to the overall success of the team. Managing up is not about manipulation or trying to control your manager. It’s about building a strong working relationship based on trust, effective communication, and mutual respect. By demonstrating your competence, reliability, and commitment, you can effectively manage up, have the trust and proactive support of your manager, and contribute to your professional growth and success. (This article partially written by ChatGPT!) View the full article

I have been in technology management for more than 20 years now and have worked in a wide variety of shops, and I think I’ve identified a key element that creates a good leader, and that is gratefulness. Gratefulness Empowers Recognition Everyone knows that “employee recognition” is important for morale; any company cites it as a priority whether they are really doing it or not. Sometimes it just gets forgotten – but sometimes there’s excuses given not to do it, concerns that it “sounds artifical” or that “they get thanks in form of their salary” or “people will be uncomfortable or jealous.” And some people honestly have a hard time doing it. I’ve found that those that cultivate an actual spirit of gratefulness within them for other peoples’ work, especially for those who work for you and the sweat of their brow contributes to your success and growth, have an easier time of it. This shouldn’t be a surprise. The classic Dale Carnegie book How To Win Friends and Influence People is often categorized as a “sales book.” It’s not, it’s way more profound than that and deserves a place in any leader’s library. In its introduction there’s explicitly a story of a man with 314 employees who did nothing but criticize them, then studied the book’s principles, and subsequently turned around his management strategy so he had 314 friends and not 314 enemies, leading to both increased happiness and increased profitability. And Part 2 of the book quickly gets to the “how” – it starts with “Become genuinely interested in other people” and ends with “Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.” I don’t think it’s a shocking revelation that gratefulness leads to better recognition and therefor to better morale, but what I want to get across here is that even if you’re not good at that out of the gate, it can be learned. And once you learn it, you get more help from other people. I personally grew up as a very introverted person who was happy alone and on the computer, and not being very interested in others. But in my early career I quickly saw that was holding me back. I wanted to change it so I read How To Win Friends and Influence People and tried to put it into action. Awkwarly and self-consciously at first, of course. Then something strange started happening to me. People I didn’t know would turn and talk to me in the elevator! I was, frankly, shocked. Generally in my life up to that point, in public I left people alone and they left me alone. I came to the realization that even my demeanor had changed and was more open somehow, and it was causing people I didn’t even know and wasn’t intending to interact with to feel like they could interact with me. And not to hassle me, but to help me. Ungratefulness Leads To Bad Decisions For many years I thought that gratefulness was just something that made you friendlier and made recognition easier and so was good in the long term. But then I worked at a startup where the CEO had a deep, fundamental lack of gratefulness, and I saw how that leads to critically bad decisonmaking. Because people, and people’s work, have value – not in some hug-filled hippie sense, but in a very tangible sense. At the company in question the CEO came to me several times wanting to fire an engineer who had legit written 80% of the working product code in the shop “because he doesn’t think architect level.” He ousted a co-founder who was the only person who had actually brought in sales for the company. So years later it was a startup that had trouble even creating a shipping product and certainly wasn’t growing revenue, and had – seriously estimating – about 300% employee turnover in its lifetime. He sabotaged his own company because he couldn’t look at even objective value creation (working code! shipping product! sales revenue!) and value those who generate it at all. That really made me stop and think. The stereotype of the ungrateful leader is one that only values hard objective results and “is mean” to people otherwise, but my experience has led me to the conclusion that’s a false dichotomy – if you are unable to see value you’re going to be unable to see it whether it’s in a person or in github or on a ledger book. Especially in a sector where that value is being created by the skilled workers! Instead, you want to train yourself to see value so that you can gather more of it and help it grow! It’s not just being a kind leader because that’s “in” this decade, gratefulness is actually a strength you can develop that helps you make effective decisions. View the full article

Hey all! James and I are preparing to revise our LinkedIn Learning course, DevOps Foundations, a three hour set of videos designed to orient beginners in the whole scope of DevOps. We created the course in 2016 primarily because at the time there were no good introductions to DevOps. You needed to know what blogs to follow and what events to go to and that was it. Even the DevOps Handbook hadn’t come out yet. And this provided a very high barrier to entry to the field. And we believe in learning and collaboration so we knew what we had to do! Since then, it’s been one of the top tech courses on LinkedIn Learning with over 400,000 learners so far and has generated a dozen other courses drilling down into detail in specific areas. The things that make it worth it to me is the people we run across who say “this helped me improve my career.” My favorite was one gentleman who pulled me aside at the Aqua Security booth at RSA back before the pandemic and said “Hey, I had just gotten out of the Army and was trying to get a good job, and so was looking at tech. Your course oriented me enough that I got a sales job here!” Being able to help people like that is a rare privilege and we really value it. Please fill out our survey to let us know what you think are the key things someone needs to learn about DevOps – whether they have some existing dev or ops knowledge or are just getting into it! Here’s the old table of contents for reference… A lot of this hasn’t changed, the basics are still the basics, but it has been 7 years and a lot has changed, some things to add, some things to change, some things to cut. Let us know your opinion! DevOps Basics What Is DevOps? – Understand the meaning of DevOps and why you might care about it. DevOps Core Values: CAMS – Culture, Automation, Measurement, and Sharing are the core values of DevOps. DevOps Principles: The Three Ways – The Three Ways can guide your strategic approach to DevOps. Your DevOps Playbook – There’s a developing list of patterns and methodologies that can help you transition to DevOps. Ten Practices for DevOps Success: 10 through 6 – Tactical, pragmatic tips for DevOps success in your organization Ten Practices for DevOps Success: 5 through 1 – Tactical, pragmatic tips for DevOps success in your organization DevOps Tools – the Cart Or The Horse? – The role of tools in DevOps and tips for selecting and using tooling to achieve your end goal. DevOps: A Culture Problem The IT Crowd and the Coming Storm – Existing IT culture has both internal and external problems. Meanwhile, new challenges of scale and business cadence are pressing technology departments to change. Use Your Words – Communication is the key to collaboration and solving problems when the stakes are high. Do Unto Others – Build trust and respect and eliminate blame and hostility in your teams. Throwing Things Over Walls – Break down the silos and establish a culture of responsibility and ownership, and align your teams to support the flow of concept to cash. Kaizen: Continuous Improvement – Everything can be iterated upon to make it better – even yourself! The Building Blocks of DevOps DevOps Building Block: Agile – DevOps extends Agile principles to include deployment and operations. DevOps Building Block: Lean – Understanding Lean can be the difference between a DevOps implementation that helps you achieve your company’s goals and one that’s just “the same but different.” ITIL, ITSM, and the SDLC – Where does the “old school” fit in to a DevOps world? Infrastructure Automation Infrastructure As Code – Take a fundamentally different approach to building distributed systems whether in the datacenter or in the cloud. Golden Image to Foil Ball – Learn about configuration mangement, automated provisioning, deployment and orchestration. Immutable Deployment – With the rise of containers, different CM patterns are gaining currency. Your Infrastructure Toolchain – Common tools in this space include Chef, Puppet, and Ansible but new container-based approaches like docker are on the rise. [Yes, this was before terraform and kubernetes, definitely places to update] Continuous Delivery Small + Fast = Better – Delivering small batches of change quickly reduces risk, improves quality, and restricts technical debt. Continuous Integration Practices – Learn about Continuous Integration, Delivery, and Deployment, which you need and how to get there. The Continuous Delivery Pipeline The Role Of QA – Move from manual testing to automated with Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior Driven Development (BDD). Your CI Toolchain – From Github to Jenkins, your code pipeline consists of many different parts with specific functions. Reliability Engineering Engineering Doesn’t End With Deployment – If you build it, you run it and other patterns for reliability engineering. Design For Operation – Theory – Building a system to be resilient is the highest leverage step in ensuring high uptime and low MTTR. Design For Operation – Practice – Ops has learned hard lessons about resiliency over the years – take it into account when building your applications. Operate For Design: Metrics and Monitoring – Operational support isn’t just keeping the systems up, it provides crucial feedback back into the development cycle. {Yes, the kids call this observability now] Operate for Design: Logging Your SRE Toolchain – Monitoring, troubleshooting, and metrics are a vital space in your tooling strategy. Additional DevOps Resources Unicorns, Horses, and Donkeys, Oh My – In an emerging discipline, going to events to learn from other expert practitioners is your fastest route to success. Ten Best DevOps Books You Need to Read – There’s a growing number of books on DevOps, here’s our top 10 reading list. Navigating The Series of Tubes – DevOps information on the Web is fragmented and hard to find sometimes; here’s some of the best places to watch. The Future of DevOps Cloud to Containers to Serverless – Profound changes to our computing model have arrived to challenge many of our established practices. The Rugged Frontier of DevOps: Security – Security is changing and is rapidly uptaking the DevOps movement, we cover the major implications here. {Yes. the kids call this DevSecOps now] Conclusion Next Steps: Am I a DevOp now? – Learn what next steps you should pursue for growing in DevOps understanding and practice. View the full article

Well, the Agile Admins have handed the reins of DevOpsDays Austin off to a new generation! And DoDA 2023 is coming up next week! I’ll be there, participating rather than wrangling for once… Shaun Mouton, one of the new core organizers, asked me to share an annotated overview of items which may be of interest to attendees! So read on, and hope to see you out at the conference. Austin musical notes for Visitors and Interested Parties DevOpsDays Austin 2023 is coming up quite soon, and I thought I’d mention for the out-of-towners and folks who might want to know that there are some decent shows happening around the same time: May 3rd: The Black Dahlia Murder w/Terror, etc at the Mohawk Metalheads, trudge through some sludge. TBDM is here. Daisy The Great at Antone’s If twee indie pop heavy on harmony is your thing get your fill of Brooklyn’s darling sextet at Antone’s. Portland’s Olive Klug is playing too and this will probably be a really fun show. The Drakes at Saxon Pub The Drakes put on a tremendous rock n roll show at one of Austin’s classic venues. Arc Angels at Gruene Hall I can’t make this show and I’m bummed about it. You should go catch this Hill Country supergroup at one of Texas’ finest music venues. Warren Hood at ABGB I’ve heard good things about his shows but haven’t made it yet. Still, I feel pretty comfortable recommending this one. Wednesdays with W.C. Clark at Pinballz Kingdom in Buda The Godfather of Austin Blues lays it down. W.C.’s still got it and you can get it too. Libby and the Loveless Sam’s Town Point is a great place to hang out and see a show, and L&tL (nobody calls them that) will play a fine mix of country standards. Michael Hale Organ Trio & Sketch at C-Boy’s Heart & Soul Bar If you’re coming to Austin for the first time or haven’t been to C-Boy’s you might want to make this show. Great venue, great music. Matt the Electrician & friends at The 04 Center Matt’s fantastic, this is likely to be a great show, and the 04 is a good venue for them. May 4th: Lil Wayne at Stubb’s I might skip out on evening events if I can make this one. Sorry y’all, it’s Tha Carter. Tennis at ACL Live at the Moody Theater Tennis is a bit precious, but if you’re into it they’re a lot of fun. Dance it out at the Moody. Barbara Nesbitt & Friends at The Continental Club Gallery I’m getting a little annoyed writing these now, there’s so much to see. Nesbitt’s voice is a delightful slice of Americana. Two Step Lessons You’ve got good choices if you want to learn how to two-step on Thursday. Sam’s Town Point and the White Horse cater to newbies who want to learn how to put a little twang in their electric slide. Large Brush Collection, Little Mazarn, Jenny Carson at Feels So Good FSG started out as a differently named screenprinting shop and showed up at a few local tech conferences making shirts for attendees to-order. They’re chill people and put on a great series of shows at the shop. Greg Koch at the 04 Center Pretty sure Koch is going to tear the A-frame roof of the sucker. If you’re into groovy six-string acrobatics this will be a fun outing. The Arc Angels with Madam Radar at Riverbend Centre Again, probably going to have to miss this one For Reasons, but I’m not happy about it. Grab this chance to see some of our local greats burn the house down. Manny Velazquez at the Little Longhorn Saloon Manny V knows country music, puts on a good show, and Austin’s lucky to have him. Classic country sound at a fun little venue. May 5th: The Blues Specialists at The Continental Club The Blues Specialists have been holding down the Continental Club for ages with their Texas-style jump blues. If that sounds even a little like your jam, it’s absolutely your jam. Get you to the Continental, friend. The Psychedelic Furs at ACL Live at the Moody Theater. You a Furs fan? This would be a decent opportunity to catch them. The Moody Theater is a fine place to see a show. Oh, and apparently Evan Dando too, as a treat. Charlie Robison at Gruene Hall Charlie Robison is a genuine Austin treasure, and Gruene Hall is a stellar venue to see him perform. One of the finest singer-songwriters to come out of a town overflowing with them. Wild Child at Emo’s Austin indie pop band, they’ve got a lot of fun songs. The vocalist reminds me of my favorite New Orleans chanteuse. Austin tasty eats local food recommended by a local (it me, I grew up here) Start here with this guide from Paul Czarkowski and friends for stuffing your face around this place. It could be somewhat out of date, things change pretty fast around here. I’ll add some notes of my own here even though I’ve contributed to that before: Central TX BBQ Don’t bother with the BBQ sides, it’s all about the meat. Have a nice salad somewhere else before and after or maybe a smoothie from Juiceland. Kerlin BBQ has sadly closed up shop, although they do still sell tasty kolaches. Gourdough’s may have closed too, which would be a blessing for my waistline. Quesabirria tacos These are still pretty hot right now, but prepare yourself. You dip the tacos in the cup of consomme and it all drips, this ain’t for fancy dress occasions. Bring extra napkins, and eat em fast before the tacos cool off from the griddle. La Tunita 512 – 2400 Burleson Rd this was one of Austin’s first offerings for quesabirria de res, and they’re delicious. Actual Tacos There’s Tacodeli and Torchy’s for the white people food that’s pretty tasty, and then there are tacos. These are taco joints. Cuantos Tacos – 1108 E 12th St Located about a mile away from the Alumni Center, Cuantos serves the sort of tacos you might find in CDMX. They’re good. Veracruz All Natural (and Veracruz Fonda) Somewhat fancy, somewhat down-to-earth, Veracruz is tasty and I am happy to recommend them to you. Other Items Of Interest If you’re spending any amount of time here and need something not covered by this guide feel free to holler at me on whatever social media platform you favor and can find me, I’ll be happy to come up with something that’ll put a smile on your face. I’m glad you’re going to be at the conference, please say hi or wave in my general direction if you get a chance! Shaun View the full article

Subscribe to Work LifeGet stories from Work Life in your inbox Subscribe Dismiss Subscribe to Inside Atlassian Email Address Sign up Thank you for subscribing. Our mission is to unleash the potential of all teams by harnessing the power of collaboration tools and practices. This is particularly true for teams practicing DevOps, which is all about unlocking collaboration between development, IT operations, and business teams. However, this increased collaboration can come at a cost to developers. Instead of coding and building innovative solutions, developers can end up spending a big chunk of their day integrating multiple tools, updating work status, and sharing it with other teams. This came out loud and clear in the DevOps Trends Survey we conducted earlier this year. We found that the same practices that were supposed to make developers’ lives easier were in fact causing new kinds of pain. Too many disconnected tools, manual processes, and constantly changing collaboration practices are blocking developers from reaching the full promise of DevOps. 90 percent of teams reported that DevOps had a positive impact on the business, but there’s also a danger that it can take time away from innovation, with 84 percent saying that they faced barriers to implementation. Today, we are announcing 12 new features, automations and integrations to help developers take their time back and ship better code, faster. Less context switching. Fewer meetings. Fewer pings from IT about security incidents. Just more time to code and deliver value to customers. We’re helping developers focus on their code as we uniquely connect development, IT operations, and business teams with automation that spans our products and third-party tools. With Jira as the backbone and ultimate source of truth, Atlassian unifies all of DevOps work and reduces collaboration overload. Read on to learn more about how we’re helping developers get more productive. Plan and track projects right in the context of your code We believe that the DevOps toolchain is not a one-sized-fits-all approach. DevOps is a toolbox across different applications and teams, and the developer knows best when it comes to what tools to use or how many. But with that flexibility comes a critical need for coordination of the work. Our survey found that an increasing number of DevOps teams are saying they need 5+ tools to understand project status. IT Ops and Business teams that aren’t closely working in these tools need to know what’s happening and when. That’s where Jira comes in. Jira automatically unifies work across teams and tools. We’ve built deep integrations between Jira Software Cloud and Bitbucket Cloud, GitHub, and GitLab so that issue tracking and project updates happen right where you code, automatically. No need to go back to Jira. And your project manager won’t have to ping you for updates and interrupt your coding flow, because your project board will automatically update based on your work in Bitbucket, GitHub, or GitLab. The new Your Work dashboard in Bitbucket Cloud has been expanded to include your assigned Jira issues so you can quickly move from one task to the next, without jumping between tools. Inside each repository, you’ll also soon see a new team-level view of connected projects and issues inside the “Jira issues” tab.In Jira Software Cloud, we’ve enhanced the automation capabilities with powerful new DevOps Automation Triggers. With just a few clicks, you can create automation rules to keep your work in sync with development activities, with triggers from commit or pull request activity in any connected code repository. At their most basic, you can automatically update the status of the related Jira issues, but these new automations also allow more complex rules like reassigning Jira issues for QA or code review, or even sending a message to your team’s Slack channel about new PRs. These automation rules work with Bitbucket Cloud, GitHub, GitLab, and any other code repository that integrates with Jira Software Cloud. Learn more about how teams that use Jira and Bitbucket release 14% more often. Review, test, and deploy code without losing your place Every team wants the best possible tools for writing and reviewing code, and with Bitbucket Cloud, we’ve got you covered. We want to maximize your developers’ productivity on the most important tasks they do each day – writing and reviewing code. Whether you prefer working in Bitbucket or your IDE, our goal is to keep you in the flow, and reduce unnecessary bounces between your tools. Bitbucket Cloud’s new Pull Request Experience delivers an innovative design that makes it easier and faster to review your code changes. New features like consolidated list of tasks, integrated Jira issue creation, and activity feed filters mean developers can complete their code reviews faster, and efficiently juggle multiple pull requests at once.The Atlassian VS Code integration brings your entire dev pipeline into your editor, with your task list from Jira Software Cloud, a complete code review experience, and CI/CD tracking from Bitbucket Pipelines. If you haven’t already seen it, try out the VS Code extension today. Ship fast without breaking things DevOps teams are trying to accelerate their pipeline through automation and “shifting left” of manual checks into the CI/CD process. To help with this, we’ve brought scanning and quality reports into the Bitbucket Cloud code review experience so reviewers are alerted of potential issues before anything gets pushed through to production. You can also try out our new automated change management, which connects your CI/CD pipeline with painless change approvals in Jira Service Desk Cloud. Code Insights in Bitbucket Cloud lets you bring the best DevOps scanning, testing and analysis tools into your code review process, including Mabl for test automation and Sentry for automated monitoring. Our new DevSecOps integration with Snyk is especially important, as Snyk can scan and highlight critical security vulnerabilities early – before they turn into a Sev-1 security incident. All these integrations are also built on an open API, so you can extend Bitbucket Cloud with additional code reports for your own tools. Automated change management with Jira Service Desk Cloud and Bitbucket Pipelines (currently in early access) will pause your CI/CD process, create a change request in Jira Service Desk, and then trigger the deployment once it is approved:Our Risk Assessment Engine in Jira Service Desk Cloud quickly scores the risk of a change and auto-approves and deploys low-risk changes.Our Change Management View in Jira Service Desk Cloud streamlines the approval process for high-risk changes by pulling all of the information together in traceable change requests the team can review and manually approve if necessary.Automated change management supports Bitbucket Pipelines, Jenkins, Circle CI, and Octopus Deploy. Mitigate alert fatigue and resolve incidents faster When incidents happen, the key to fast resolution is determining the cause of the problem quickly. And as your teams adopt DevOps and automate their deployment processes, change-related failures become increasingly common. When you’re woken up to deal with an outage, wouldn’t it be great to know whether a recent code change caused the issue, and immediately be able to get help from the right developer? For most teams today, this requires advanced detective work, trawling through Git history and Jira tickets. We knew there had to be a better way. Opsgenie’s brand new, deep integration into Jira Software Cloud and Bitbucket Cloud helps teams shortcut this whole process, giving the first responders an audit trail for recent deployments and their related Jira tickets. Our Opsgenie and Bitbucket Cloud integration centralizes all alerts and filters out the noise to make sure the right issues are being picked up, the right people are being alerted, and the right action is taken. With the Incident Investigation Dashboard, teams can look at the deployment that happened right before the incident, add it as a potential cause, and contact the developer who made the change so that they can roll it back and resolve the incident. DevOps is about tools and practices/culture Successful DevOps implementation doesn’t end at connecting the tools. Most DevOps practitioners agree, citing people and culture as the top factor in successfully implementing. To strike this balance, we’ve created a new destination for you to learn and share DevOps best practices. Our resources hub shares guidance on how to connect tools with practices and cultivate a world-class DevOps culture. The hub will include:DevOps Community (featuring exclusive AMAs with DevOps thought leaders)DevOps Confluence templates (to improve DevOps rituals and set long-term team goals)DevOps Guides (on how to connect tools like Jira with industry best practices like CI/CD) We’ve also extended our automated integrations to your go-to communication tools. For your day-to-day, our Slack integration and Statuspage integrations can help you adopt DevOps best practices in both your internal and external communications. Get started with Atlassian DevOps Ready to simplify your DevOps workflow? Learn more about how we think about DevOps at Atlassian, discover best practices to improve how your team is performing, or just get started on your journey by signing up today. Empower your team to focus on the code Starting work from Jira Software Cloud? Stay in flow with the code from your board. We know developers spend most of their time in their Git tool or in the IDE, but when you do log into Jira, we’ve made it easier to understand projects in the context of code. Here are some additional updates we’ve added to more closely align your Jira view with the way you work: – Developer Tool Summary & Release Management in Jira Native Apps: We’ve added a new DevTools summary and Release Hub into our Jira native apps for iOS, Android, and desktop. Visualize both first- and third-party developer tool integrations in our native apps, and manage releases anytime, anywhere. – Code in Jira (Coming soon): Connect Bitbucket to Jira and automatically see which repositories your team works across right within the new Code view in Jira. With Code as a top-level project navigation item your team can get visibility of the code that is actively being worked on without needing to leave Jira. – Deployments in Jira (Coming soon): View CI/CD deployment information and pre-planned releases right from within Jira Software. Visualize the progress of work as it moves through the deployment pipeline. With the new view, you’ll never have to worry about missing the status on a change ever again. Simply check the view to get clear visibility into where a change is in the pipeline and when it will reach customers. The post Stay code-connected with 12 new DevOps features appeared first on Work Life by Atlassian. View the full article

What do coffee and donuts have in common with Jira Software Server and Bitbucket Server? Together, they make for a great experience, and I’d even go as far to say having one without the other is a bit unsatisfying. We at Atlassian know the ins and outs of coffee and don– er… I mean Jira Software and Bitbucket because we use them together every day to take the busy-work out of our workflows. Teams that use both tools should definitely integrate them (it’s a pretty straightforward process). When you do, you unleash a powerful set of features that make life easier both for admins and end users. In addition to the detailed info in our documentation, there are a some higher-level things to keep in mind so you get the most out of the integration. Before integration – what you need to know 1. You can use a single instance of Bitbucket Server or Data Center to support your entire organization, even if you have multiple Jira Software Server instances. Bitbucket Server and Data Center are highly scalable and can natively integrate with multiple Jira Software instances at once. Your team can get to know Bitbucket and adopt common version control practices without being under pressure to consolidate project management tooling at the same time. Remember to encourage unique project names across your various Jira instances. If by chance you have two projects with the same name in two instances, Bitbucket will honor the integration marked as the ‘PRIMARY’. Learn more here. 2. Permissions are permissions are permissions. Jira Software and Bitbucket are structured in similar ways, not only in data architecture, but also with security enforcement for easier maintenance and admins’ peace of mind. For example, let’s say you have permissions schemes in Jira Software which prohibit particular users from transitioning certain issues. Let’s also say those users have access to Bitbucket (where you can also transition issues, thanks to the integration), but you’ve not set up the equivalent permission scheme there. No worries. Jira Software and Bitbucket honor each other’s permissions. In this case, those users would be blocked from transitioning those issues via Bitbucket. Likewise, if a Jira Software user isn’t granted access to your Bitbucket instance, then they won’t be able to view linked Git commits, branches, or pull requests from inside Jira Software. 3. Issue keys + branches + commits = traceability and visibility Issues keys are literally the key to using Jira and Bitbucket as an integrated pair. Including the relevant issue key in your branch names (e.g., “feature-DEV-12345”) and commit message creates a bi-directional link between the pieces. So when viewing an issue in Jira Software, for example, you’ll be able to see all the commits and branches associated with that issue key, and vice versa when you’re in Bitbucket. Using a branch-per-issue model is the easiest way to bake this into your workflow. Inside each Jira Software issue, you’ll see a “Create branch” button, which – you guessed it – steps you through creating a branch in Bitbucket, with the issue key already incorporated into a suggested name for the branch. Teams that absolutely require full traceability (audits, anyone?) often use a Git hook that verifies there’s an issue key in each commit message and each branch and rejects them if there isn’t. If writing a custom Git hook isn’t your thing, there are several available in the Atlassian Marketplace. After integration – get the most out of your tooling Jira and Bitbucket integrate in so many nifty little ways even we have a hard time remembering them all. To get the most out of these tools, make sure you’re doing these three things. 1. Create a workflow that’s right for your team. With the combination of Bitbucket Server and Jira Software Server, you can customize branching models, workflow triggers, and Git hooks to create a workflow that makes sense for individual teams, while enforcing company-wide standards like permissions and restrictions. Branching model – You can specify branch types and their naming conventions for your Bitbucket Server instance. For example, you may decide to select branch types feature, bugfix, hotfix, and release as well as a default prefix. Once that’s set up, whenever you go to create a new branch from an issue, Jira Software will pre-populate branch name and type based on the issue type and your branching model settings. So if the Jira Software issue type is “bug”, the branches you create from it will default to your bugfix naming convention. Oh yeah. Workflow triggers – These are rules that automatically transition Jira Software issues from one status to another when a certain event occurs: upon pull request creation, a new commit, or similar. This means teammates and stakeholders always see an up-to-date status, even if developers are heads-down coding away. Merge restrictions and Git hooks – It’s easy to configure rules that prevent users from merging or pushing code if a particular requirement is unmet. Bitbucket Server ships with several – like requiring green CI builds, or all commits be GPG signed – but you can add your own as well. Any custom rule or requirement in your development flow can be solved by a custom merge restriction, Git hook, or even a webhook. It’s all about making your workflow work for you. 2. Make changes to Jira issues on the fly, in the context that best fits your role. For the developers out there, there’s nothing worse than being in the zone, only to have your flow interrupted. Luckily, the Jira-Bitbucket integration helps you take care of project overhead tasks like looking for, transitioning, adding comments to, or creating new Jira Software issues. Repository shortcuts and linked Jira issues in Bitbucket Server – Clicking on a linked Jira issue key within Bitbucket Server brings the Jira Software issue up on your screen dialog, with all its information and the ability to transition it right then and there. Likewise, repository shortcuts offer links at the repository level to any related asset, like a Jira Software board, Confluence space, Bamboo plan, or whatever else is important to you. Smart commits – By supplying a special command in your commit message, you can comment, transition, and even record time against related Jira Software issues without ever leaving your terminal window. Creating a Jira issue from inside a pull request – Spot some code that needs refactoring during a pull request? Create a Jira Softwrae issue to track that work directly from your pull request comments inside of Bitbucket. 3. Get to know the release hub. To all the product managers, release managers, and other stakeholders out there, the Release Hub is your friend. If your team applies all the tips we’ve discussed so far, you’ll be confident all your Jira Software issues are current and have complete information. And you can see it all in the Release Hub – yourone-stopp shop for assessing the status of a release. The Release Hub provides a roll-up of all the issues in each release version. With all of that information in one place, Jira Software can help you assess the health of your release and answer questions like “Has all the code in this version been reviewed?” or “Are there any open pull requests remaining in this version?” Anyone with access to the Release Hub can check out the status of work in progress. No need to build custom reports or hold extra status meetings. Putting it all together Jira Software and Bitbucket might never make your mouth water the way coffee and donuts do, but they stand stronger together nonetheless and help your team move faster. If you’d like to see for yourself how Jira Software Server and Bitbucket Server work better together give Bitbucket Server or Data Center a try today. Try Bitbucket Data Center The post 6 things you should know before & after integrating Jira Software Server with Bitbucket Server appeared first on Work Life by Atlassian. View the full article