Forem: Brian McNabola

How do you deal with One-upmanship ?

Brian McNabola — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 17:58:56 +0000

Let me start with this.

"Computers are easy its people that are hard"

We've all been there.. Your on slack or hangouts or reddit..Your trying to discuss or highlight something that someone might find useful. Some project you are working on or a tool you built to shave some time off a repetitive task or a third party app ..something you believe gives value.

Then you get hit with the "expert" opinion that provides no feedback or improvement. Just a pendantic statement highlighting a irrelevant observation.

This is usually a one-upmanship moment. These put downs are what drive imposter syndrome among a dev community.

How do you steer theses discussions back into a constructive conversation and not play into a egotistical game?

I don't mean to come across as bitter here but there are issues in dev culture like this that disable a learning mindset.

And I am in no means dissing being a expert in a subject. But with that expertise it's better to use your knowledge for the greater of the community.

Make your shell scripts safer with set builtin.

Brian McNabola — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 22:38:46 +0000

set allows you to change the values of shell options and set the positional parameters, or to display the names and values of shell variables.

set -e
The -e option will cause a bash script to exit immediately when a command fails. This is generally good as it prevents damage being caused by unexpected errors.

set -u
This option causes the bash shell to treat unset variables as an error and exit immediately. This is useful for debugging & catching typos in varible names.
Also for keeping scripts cleaner.

set -o pipefail
This particular option sets the exit code of a pipeline to that of the rightmost command to exit with a non-zero status, or to zero if all commands of the pipeline exit successfully.

This is extremely useful for stopping a script execution causing damage when the previous command in the pipe was unsuccesful.

Include the below in your next script and reap the benefits.

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

What IT stereotype bothers you?

Brian McNabola — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 21:52:09 +0000

One of my peeves are the age old. "What does your significant other do?" "Oh they just work with computers."

Is Perl still used ?

Brian McNabola — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 20:54:04 +0000

When I started as a junior sysadmin with zero scripting skills. I inherented many perl scripts that I just used for operational tasks.
Some of our monolithic apps are still running on perl. But nobody touches these servers as the dev talent pool has cycled and anyone with perl knowledge is gone. I attempted to learn perl I did manage to write a script to emulate a user logon to one of our apps but just couldnt grow to love it, finding solice in python and bash instead.
I never heard or read much discusssion about perl so is there many people here actively using it and for what ?

Monolithic, Automated or Transitioning

Brian McNabola — Tue, 09 Jan 2018 17:27:42 +0000

I am just curious to understand the state of Automation adoption in IT Sector.

I know Automation is a broad term to use so lets just use this scope.

Automated = Automated provisioning of servers (Infrastructure as code ) with CI/CD pipelines in place.

Monolithic = Manual server provisioning & Manual app deployment.

Transitioning = Open project to deliver automation of provisioning and deployment tools and pipelines (Openstack Chef Jenkins etc...)

To start I am currently in the Transitioning Phase.