How Gareth Rushgrove finds links for Devops Weekly
The best, longest running newsletter in DevOps-land
I’m on vacation these week, so I have no musings on the seven year distraction of kubernetes, platform engineering, or business strategies for ChatGPT. However, we’re down near Ghent, so maybe we’ll have some more pickle problems. Thankfully, Gareth sent me a great edition of The Link Gourmand, so I can lean on him for some content this issue.
The Link Gourmand
This is a new section where I ask people how they find links. You like links, I like links, they like links! Here we have Gareth Rushgrove, author of the Devops Weekly newsletter. I have read this newsletter since, I don’t know, it was created. I find it one of the best. Anyhow, you’ll get the background from Gareth below:
I’ve been running the Devops Weekly newsletter now for a frankly ridiculous 12 years. Two of the reasons I think for that longevity are the broadness of the subject matter, and a decision I made very early on to keep things as simple as I could. While my interests have changed over that 12 year period, devops is vaguely defined enough that it’s always had something that interests me. And keeping things simple means it generally takes less time to pull together every week than people probably expect.
In terms of finding content, it’s probably gone through a few phases.
The first phase was really around the time when the term devops was just starting to be used. I was actively involved in a very small community. I attended the second devopsdays event in Hamburg with around 80 people or so in 2010. The #Infra-talk IRC was a big influence. I spoke at the very first Configuration & Systems Management devroom at FOSDEM. The early open source community around Puppet. I was involved with the O’Reilly Velocity Conference on the operations track. This was also around the time Twitter started to grow, and the #devops hashtag was incredibly high signal-to-noise [This reminded me of when Twitter was useful! -Coté], and a great way of finding people and new content. At this point I wasn’t looking for content for the newsletter, rather the reverse. The newsletter came from the fact I was immersed in this interesting new community and thought it would be useful to share what I was reading with others as a bit of a service.
The next phase really coincided with the growth of that community. Devops took off, which meant more content, but also a lower signal to noise ratio. The community also broadened the topics it was interested in. You can see this by looking back at the schedules for early devopsdays events to now. More people and process conversations and more security content started to appear. During this time I build a bit of automation to help me find content. I ran bots extracting links from various Twitter hashtags, and blogging and RSS were still a thing. This was also where we saw the rise of containers, and in particular projects like Docker and Kubernetes. I was close to both communities, as a user and a contributor, so had lots (some would say too much) content in that space. Large and small events started appearing more frequently as well. From KubeCon to DockerCon to Velocity to devopsdays. These provided a hugely valuable source of interesting talks and content.
Which brings us to today. Devops is far more mainstream, and it’s also a much broader topic than back in 2011. While infrastructure automation topics are still a staple, we have better tools than we’ve ever had, the community as a whole is also just as interested today in higher level business topics of strategy, security or compliance. Today my reading habits have changed, but I also have a larger readership. That audience is hugely important to finding interesting content now, every week I receive links from folks they have read, found interesting and thought might be relevant for the newsletter. I’m always happy for people to send me links, and I read everything I’m sent, although I unfortunately don’t have time to provide feedback beyond including it in the newsletter or not.
For me, the newsletter has always been about reading more than writing. It’s been a useful forcing function for me to optimise how I discover and read interesting content. That I’ve also been able to publish that to 30k subscribers or so and they have found it useful for so long says a lot about the lasting impact of devops.
Wastebook
“Like how is the world real[?]” Here.
“weird tech guys making long threads about growth-hacking their open relationships using their Notion second brain or whatever” Here.
“You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative, as is good or bad management.” Out on the seas.
“Anyway, time passed as time does and before you knew it, it wasn’t the 1990s anymore.” Here.
“If we had used the standard IBM organization and procedures, it would have taken us three years to ship an empty box.” Here
Relative to your interests
Productive meeting activities: Leverage the team, empower the individual - Jason lists several types of meetings and their utility.
Progress Studies - As always, it’s fun to see Tyler reason through things: how he structure his thoughts. Also: I like the optimism here that comes from having a project, a purpose of what you’re doing. I mean: progress, right?
The Best ChatGPT Prompts For Content Strategy and Creation - Has a lit of prompts for various things.
Patchwork and stack book decoration - Put your books in like Tetris.
Have one talk to stay sane. - Give the same talk over and over, refining it each time. If you need to, have two talks. // “I had what I now see as an insane pathology to reinvent a new talk for every speaking engagement. I highly recommend NOT DOING THIS if you decide to start giving talks. Take one talk, and refine the heck out of it. Nobody cares if you’re doing the same talk over and over again. Think of talks like public theater — Richard III isn’t performed once and thrown away.”
Unicode Arrows - There’s lots of arrows in Unicode, so there’s lots of arrows for you.
The Gigabit Generation - The Internet is finally fast in the US.
Recreating ANSI Art from a screenshot | bertrand fan - Tell me you’re a Gen-X’er without telling me you’re a Gen-X’er…
Just keep publishing - “quantity trumps quality when it comes to building, growing, and maintaining reach. Especially building. It’s easier to slow your roll and focus on quality when you already have an audience” // From Klint Finley’s newsletter, 26 Feb 2023.
It’s not the merit of the idea — it’s the price. - ‘Defense of insurance: “Look at the settlement the policyholder received. It has so many zeros in it.” Rebuttal: That would be true even if the insurance cost twice as much. So the issue isn’t whether there would be a settlement it’s the proposition on the whole.’ That is, the price.
Logoff
I came across something very old school internet that I like a lot: the JPEG · ZiP newsletter. Maybe I’ll start doing something like that for the weekend edition. I’m a big fan (that us, reader/scroller) of things like tumblr and are.na, but I don’t want to start putting things in yet another content hole.
I’ve kept using ChatGPT for a link summarizer and digest. When I have my usual 30 to 60 minutes to do these editions, I’ll have to figure out how to integrate it in. It’s especially good for clickbaity content from buzzfeed, Business Insider, and traditional newspapers. You can use it to see if it’s worth even reading in the first place.
See y’all next time - obviously since I’m on vacation, perhaps more daily-ish than daily.