Unfrequently Asked Questions

I'm Sorry for my Absence

It's been over six months since I last posted and I feel bad for anyone that had been anxiously awaiting my most recent outburst of insanity after starting to work from home. Perhaps to the chagrin of some, I haven't found myself completely off the reservation & teetering on the edge of insanity. Instead, I've been busy immersing myself in honing my trade, contributing to my team, and providing guidance/mentorship to others.

It's been so intense for me lately that I'd posit I'm in hitting a local maxima of my potential -- and that feels incredible.

What Have I Been Doing?

Contributions

Since my last post, I've become significantly ingrained in the Ansible ecosystem and have started to contribute back to community as well and a lot of my contributions revolve around that project.

meredith-digops

Several utilities to help cloud admins, similar to myself, manage and cleanup resources that are no longer useful.

tomislacker/jira-graph

Built graphs around issues in Jira based on their depdencies.

ansible/ansible #22854

Introduces the ability to manage AWS SES Rule sets in order to automate the configuration required for processing of inbound emails.

This work also contributed to some of the success of my wife recently.

ansible/ansible #22620

Adds the ability to enable the collection of metrics on Amazon Auto scaling groups.

While I'm not the original author of it, I'm preparing a pull request that will make it functional when the module is moved to be relient on boto3.

ansible/ansible #21135

Using this individual's module, I identified cases where it did not work appropriately and have been preparing a pull request on the side to fix the functionality and introduce other augmented capabilities.

mmillican/StandupMan #1

I ansible-ized the AMI creation and maintenance of an ASG+ELB for this application as a favor to a friend.

tomislacker/python-mke-trash-pickup #12

A contribution to my own program to assist in notififying when garbage and/or recycling day is in the city of Milwaukee. This latest PR fixes parsing issues with the Summer schedule.

tomislacker/aws-cgateway-role

Created an Ansible role for a friend to manage AWS customer/VPN gateways on Ubuntu-based machines

tomislacker/ansible-he-4to6-tunnel

Created an Ansible role for myself to manage a 6to4 tunnel on a Debian-based box.

VPC Migrations

Some of my work "customers" are in the midst of VPC migrations; whether that be EC2-Classic to EC2-VPC, or simply changing VPCs. This whole process has burned up a lot of my mental computation at least lately. Particuarly the classic migrations are not always as straight forward as one might assume.

These issues are further aggravated by the developers within those accounts not having a solid understanding of how their application(s) work. Classic to VPC migrations are always hard, but they go up exponentially in difficulty when seemingly nobody understands what the application(s) are doing.

Mentorship

The wife & I are preparing to get our AWS Certified Solutions Architect (Associate) under our belts, and I've been simultaneously working through study guides for the Professional level one as well.

Our next stop is probably the devops path

My high-school-aged sister

She's in a STEM program as a trial run in the state

I support her by learning what I'm not presently knowledgeable on so that I can provide valuable incite to her while she pursues her accreditation.

Other

Working on a "Career Day" presentation to describe what an IT operations person does

Date is set for 2017-04-28

Audience is 7th-8th graders (12-14yo)

I still have nothing concrete, I'm trying to formulate my plan on how to present my work and keep it interesting

Unfrequently Asked Questions

Other articles

Emergency Router Cut-Over

Day 22: Holed Up

Returning from Labor Day

Day 12: Break Out The Weird

Wrapping Up Week Ending 2018-08-26

Day 7: The Daily Commute

First Day Working Remote

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