Forrest Brazeal
@forrestbrazeal
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Purveyor of good tech things. prev. @google
Joined May 2015
new little song:. "The Re-Org Rag (I'm My Own VP)"
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Facebook employees are now "Metamates". (?). Can't wait for:. LinkedIn -> Inmates.Amazon -> Primates.Tinder -> Intimates.Jira -> Underestimates.Postmates -> Postmatemates.
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I'll never forget asking a guy who maintained 40yo mainframes for an insurance co why he didn't just migrate the apps. His reply: the firm's actuarial code relies on specific bugs in the mainframe OS's floating-point handling. Run on any other system, it would produce chaos.
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Absolutely fascinating insight I just heard from a hiring manager:. Adding junior engineers makes the senior engineers on his team *better*, because the constant "Why" questions force them to articulate and confront their own assumptions. Hire juniors for a stronger team!.
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"I know we hired you remote somehow. But that was then, and this is now.". New song: the RTO (Return-To-Office) Tango
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Dear intern:. We've all screwed something up,.So welcome to the club. "That Sinking Feeling (The #HugOps Song)"
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The recent "All the ways to run containers on AWS" threads have left me super confused so I made this flowchart to help. It's probably also wrong.
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Good morning. here's another Probably Wrong Flowchart, this time on AWS database services!
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This shouldn't be possible, period. There needs to be an easy, safe way for students to explore AWS without incurring unexpected megacharges.
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A longtime friend, one of the most reliably excellent software engineers I know, just left AWS for Airbnb. His reason? Airbnb is remote-friendly, and AWS gave him an ultimatum to RTO. RTO doesn’t filter out slackers, it just pushes away the people who have better options.
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Today in things that nobody stopped me from doing:. The AWS Elastic Load Balancer Yodel Rag.
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finally learned what SRE stands for . "Sysadmin (Really Expensive)".
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output of every "2021 roadmap" meeting happening this week
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On Monday, I'll be starting a new adventure as head of content at @googlecloud. Beyond excited for this chance to tell the story of the cloud at the biggest scale yet, in partnership with a visionary and brilliant group of colleagues.
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Seriously, who called it "open source" and not "anyware"?.
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I drew this 12 months ago, as LLM code assistants were just becoming available. Has it held up?
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An ode to Infinidash - the imaginary AWS service!
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In three days, I’m gonna drop something that should pretty much break AWS Twitter.
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people who used to work at postmates: post-postmatesmates.
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it's amazing to me how the average cloud security review is both paranoid and totally inadequate.
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How to digital transformation (The Butterfly Song)
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OK. Here are ten things I freakin’ love about Google Cloud’s approach to identity / accounts.
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Lately I’m seeing people defend the lack of junior cloud engineer positions by saying “cloud isn’t an entry-level job.” If that’s true, it’s quite an indictment of our industry, isn’t it?.
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I wish more CTOs understood that a "lift-and-shift" cloud migration is not a stepping stone to a better architecture; it's a delay tactic. And an expensive one.
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This one goes out to all the serious professional tech people whose Personal Website is a janky Jekyll blog last updated in 2014
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I've been trying to figure out why this particular Discord message shook me so badly today. And I just realized why. Scaring inexperienced young ppl into thinking they owe large sums of money - even if it's ultimately not true - is a life&death matter.
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Hey AWS engineers! A friend's company is hiring a bunch of you. Fully remote, US-based, and they are open to folks who want to do part-time consulting as well as FTE. Very cool projects - serverless, IoT, etc. DM for an intro.
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If I'm looking for a job 5 years from now, I'll be looking closely at how well $prospective_company retained staff between 2020 and 2022. Anybody who's keeping their team happy and loyal right now, after the year we've all had, is doing something really right.
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Life goal unlocked: I just walked into a random Barnes & Noble and found my own book on the shelf. No words to describe that feeling.
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This song is dangerous @googlecloud propaganda. Definitely don't watch all the way to the very end. "Look At You Now" (The Google Cloud Song)
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The term "skills gap" is a rhetorical trick that shifts the blame onto newbies. The actual problem is an "experience gap"; and that puts the blame right back on the industry for not providing onramps to experience for juniors.
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You can take the people out of the data center, but how do you take the data center out of the people?
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Wrote up a small rant about this. You can't expand access to the cloud until you can let newbies learn without jeopardizing their personal well-being.
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I’m leaving Google Cloud at the end of this week. Working at Google was something I’d dreamed of doing since I was 11. I met many great people in my 2.5 years there and got a taste of the complexity / impact of solving problems at hyperscale. Grateful & excited for what's next!.
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My usual beef with reference architectures is that they launder the creators' assumptions into "best practices" without helping you put your own needs in context. Turns out there's a cheat code to get past this problem, and the team that built "Emblem Giving" found it:
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I am a white dude, a family man, a business owner, born in the Deep South. I have voted for Republicans before and might do it again. In this election I was proud to vote for Kamala Harris. I believe she is the best choice for the country and the best example for my children.
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The 4 Horsemen of Serverless on AWS:. * Lambda.* IAM.* DynamoDB.* S3. Understand how to build and automate these 4 foundational services, .know their docs backward and forward, .and you can move the world.
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I know #hugops causes some people to roll their eyes, but the Log4j thing is the reason it exists. A whole bunch of people are doing stupid amounts of stressful firefighting to protect us from a problem that they didn't cause. Thank you, ops teams. ❤️.
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I wanted to solve my problem, so I built a distributed app. Now problems have two I.
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I met a guy today who is transitioning from pest control to cybersecurity, and I think this may rival "commercial plumber -> DevOps engineer" as my all-time favorite tech origin story.
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Some have pointed out the existence of AWS Educate Starter Accounts, which provide no-credit-card access to a limited subset of services. Only via participating educational institutions, though. Opening this up to all learners would be a huge step fwd.
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Hey, @ajassy: this song was supposed to be satire, not an instruction manual.
"I know we hired you remote somehow. But that was then, and this is now.". New song: the RTO (Return-To-Office) Tango
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The recent Roald Dahl thing is a reminder that if you care about your kids having access to great books, a physical home library is a smart investment. This is our kids’ collection, scrounged from Goodwill, library sales, etc - you can do this cheaply but the payoffs compound.
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Unless something changes systemically at AWS, we should expect future Kinesis Incidents, and we should expect them to be progressively bigger in scope and harder to resolve. My analysis of AWS's postmortem and the path forward:
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I have no regrets. The Serverless vs Containers Rap Battle:
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My favorite question to ask the hiring manager when interviewing for a job:. "Can you tell me about a bad day your team recently had, and how you responded to it?". Reveals so much about so. much. Every time.
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AWS: “we don’t need developer advocates for IAM”. Me: *clarifies for yet another client the difference between an IAM user “account” and an AWS account*.
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Today is my last day of full-time employment (at least for the foreseeable future). I’ve been working toward this day for a long time, since I was an 18yo kid driving an IT service car covered in vehicle wrap. Now I get the chance to do my own thing, on my terms. Surreal.
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5 things I've learned the hard way about multi-region / multi-cloud:. 1. Building your own control plane, whether cross-region or cross-cloud, involves cost and complexity that you will have to deal with every day - not just when a managed service has downtime.
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I've started to feel like the term "skills gap" is putting the blame in the wrong place.
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What is hybrid cloud, if not legacy vendors persevering?.
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Initial reaction to the way Google Cloud organizes projects and identities: I really, really like it.
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The real heroes here are the ACG video editors who painstakingly animated ALL THE SERVICE ICONS 🙏.
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So, for the first 45 minutes of this #reInvent session I was nodding my head like "Yup, that's how I think about DynamoDB." Then Rick morphed into some kind of NoSQL wizard from outer space and my mind exploded. Absolute must watch:
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This AWS war story is amazing, and perfectly illustrates the point I made in yesterday's newsletter. There is RADICAL labor savings (read $ savings) in the cloud if you commit to architecting properly.
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From a salary + opportunities standpoint, learning to write has been worth >2x more to my career than learning to code. In tech, code is table stakes. Effective writing and speaking set you apart.
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"what if we train our people, and then they leave?"
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I've finally achieved my dream of combining "Schoolhouse Rock" and cloud. Enjoy "I'm Goin' To Production" (the Software Supply Chain Song) - ideally on the biggest speakers possible.
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This is super interesting: AWS open-sourcing something close to the actual project layout, code, and ops config they use to run a serverless service in prod. Def. recommend reading the Github repo. Some surprises. May write up longer takeaway shortly.
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After an incredible journey to acquisition, today is my last day at @acloudguru. Meeting Sam, Drew, and Pete at ServerlessConf Austin in 2017 changed my life. I will forever be grateful to have been a small part of one of the great teams in cloud.
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Introducing the #CloudResumeChallenge. I'm volunteering my network to help you get your first job in the cloud. But I can only share a certain kind of resume. Thread ->
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I just don't buy this take that AI is going to decrease the absolute need for software engineers. AI is going to generate SO MUCH CODE. We are entering a post-scarcity world for code. We have nowhere near enough engineers to edit, harden, maintain all the code AIs will generate.
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People are out here pitching devtools to enterprises like "this will make your workflow easier and faster", and I'm like . have you MET an enterprise?
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The reason people don’t hire juniors onto cloud teams is the same as it’s always been. Not because the job is too hard for juniors, but because the job of apprenticing and growing them is too hard for YOU.
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The HugOps Song was written for such a time as this. Hugs to CrowdStrike, but even more so to the IT teams around the world dealing with the fallout of this outage.
Dear intern:. We've all screwed something up,.So welcome to the club. "That Sinking Feeling (The #HugOps Song)"
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Somebody called @shanselman the Bob Ross of programming and now that's all I can think of. What he's doing with TikTok is brilliant. Humanity, earnestness and digital know-how - the great attributes of Gen Z - wrapped up in 60-second packages.
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I vote we retire the term "non-technical" as a way to define non-software engineers. The Excel wizard in your accounting dept or the CRO maven on the marketing team are as digitally-literate and automation-savvy as any programmer. They just have less ego about it.
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