Tag: Education

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Business Review Technology

Review: The Phoenix Project

Back when Mrs. Sallie Draper joined our team at Martin Luther College’s Network Services, she recommended a book for our group to read. Being the person that I am, I filed it away to read in the future and bought it for my Kindle and then promptly forgot about it for far too long.

That book is The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford.

I regret that I did not pick it up sooner because as soon as I began reading its tale, I was engrossed and finished it in a single day. I don’t often do that anymore with three kids, but I found the time to do it this time.

it is billed as “A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win”, and that is a good synopsis for the entirety of the book. It is fiction about how a company falls to the bottom and then bands together to work to the top.

I’m going to try to stay away from any spoilers because I do recommend that you read this book if you work within the IT departments of any company or organization even if the story isn’t totally applicable to your size or sector.

The story is split into two halves, even if the split isn’t where you would expect it to be right away. It follows the old saying of “things will get bad before they get better”. It really does for this story but the whole it worth it to get the mind thinking about what the future might bring.

Those reading the book closely will find the agenda the authors have quite early, and you need to be aware that while they are not selling anything in the specific sense … they ARE selling an ideal for how IT should operate within the business and I tend to agree! That, of course, makes it easy to recommend the book.

It is an easy read and, I feel, time well spent.

Highly recommended.

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Life

Differences In Learning

As I’ve been working through some training material, I’ve come up with the following problem: I learn by reading and doing … not viewing videos. The problem is that a lot of the “self-paced” training available for certifications is based on videos. Usually those videos are tied up in Flash, and usually they split up the reading material into useless sections.

What I want is a book. It could be an EPUB or a physically book, but a PDF just isn’t the ideal medium when we have phones, tablets, and readers which can be any number of different sizes. Easily-reflowable text is the way to go.

The hard part is that video seems to be getting all of the press and money and I hope that we won’t see the death of high-quality reading materials for those of us who like to learn by looking at words instead of moving pictures and sound.

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Technology

The Hard Way

On Friday, May 9, I went through the most rigorous training exercise I have had to go through while learning about the art of systems administration. By “training exercise” I mean that our entire VM storage back-end fell over and start convulsing on the server room floor and I had no clue what to do or even where to start.

It wasn’t one server, but all four of the servers falling over and failing to come back up. Ultimately, I believe it was caused by an update by Ubuntu which caused the drive mappings for our DRDB system to disappear and never return where we were expecting them.

I’m not going to get into the details of what happened, how long it took (too long), or what we ultimately ended up doing (a band-aid which is working quite well) … but I am going to more generically talk about what I have learned through that experience.

  1. Always apply updates to one server at a time. Always. No exceptions. I had become complacent over the months of periodically running the updates on the storage servers and always having the system survive unscathed. All it took was one bad update and now I am more paranoid of updates than ever. Especially when you have a cluster, apply to one server at a time and verify that it is working before moving all resources back over and then applying the updates to the next one. It is common sense, I knew better, and now I’ll learn from my mistake of ignoring it.
  2. Be conservative with your infrastructure. I might change my tune on this one again, but you’ll want to push ahead with the client-side of things and be as conservative as possible with whatever is backing the client. Being of the cutting edge is going to make you bleed, and trying to do things that others are not is a recipe for a lot of pain and suffering. You want the infrastructure services to be working all of the time and then pushing ahead on what the clients are using around that infrastructure. That means you need to be conservative in the face of many bells-and-whistles being tossed around.
  3. Always know ore about your infrastructure than you think you need to. I had not spent the time I needed to learning about how our storage system worked on the very lowest level and we paid the price of a day of lost productivity because of it. If you are going to do something in-house, then you need to be willing to spend the time learning about what you are doing so that you can be comfortable putting your own eggs in your own hands at any time.
  4. The Linux community is diverse … and the DRDB/HA community is amazing! I have to give credit to two people for walking me through what to do on that day. My former co-worker, @acspike, came up and helped as much as he could (which was a ton), and ultimately helped me get the system back up and running. However, @digimer, in the DRDB IRC channel, was the one willing to spend a good two hours walking me through testing what systems were causing the issues and calming me down. Before that I was sick to my stomach and after I could at least keep down my lunch. Without those two people I’d probably still be up there trying to get things back up and running.

The main idea is that it was a good learning experience, even if some of it was stuff I knew already and should have remembered to be doing. Hopefully I don’t do it again.

Categories
Life Technology

Opportunity vs. Outcome

I posted You Need a Person earlier and it focused on Steve Jobs’ thoughts on education and technology. In that same interview there was an even shorter line from Mr. Jobs that stuck in my mind as well.

I’m a very big believer in equal opportunity as opposed to equal outcome. I don’t believe in equal outcome ’cause, unfortunately, life’s not like that and it’d be a pretty boring place if it was.

I’m pretty sure everyone knew that Steve believed in meritocracy, and this is another example of him outlining that worldview. I think, though, it belies an even greater truth that I am trying to parse out in my own mind.

When we talk about equality we need to understand that in this world, things are never going to be equal for everyone when it comes to outcome. That is a road to lowered bars and stifling the individuality of everyone. When we all need to have the same outcomes, we’re all going to end up being the same.

That would be a dreadfully boring place.

You can watch the section of the interview on YouTube. The whole thing is pretty good but you’ll need to set aside a good amount of time to watch it.

Categories
Technology

You Need a Person

I really like watching old interviews and videos of Steve Jobs. If I have a few spare minutes before my next appointment I’ll queue up some of his older stuff, or maybe the iPhone launch, and watch him “perform” while on stage just for the heck of it.

I don’t worship the man and I’ve heard many cases of the parts of his personality that I would definitely not admire, but it is fun to watch him because he seems unique in the world of public-facing executives.

Here is a quote about education from an interview done before he joined Apple again in the mid-90s. The interviewer has been asking him about his thoughts on education and he had this to say about technology in education (what is the most important thing):

As you’ve pointed out I’ve probably helped put more computers into more schools than anybody else up until this point in time and I’m absolutely convinced that that is, by no means, the most important thing. The most important thing is another person.

That’s the best transcription I can come up with and I agree with it whole heartedly. We are in the middle of everyone and their landlord talking about how technology is going to change your classroom, make your kids better learners, help improve test scores, and any list of other things … and it is all snake oil. The fundamentals of education haven’t changed and they never will and unless we keep that as the foremost idea in our minds, every single technology initiative is going to fall flat on its face because it cannot, by itself, do anything of any value.

Technology apart from people is fundamentally dead and may even be detrimental.

You can find the interview on YouTube and I’ve linked to the quote so you don’t have to hunt for it. I’ll pull out another quote from that same interview in another post.