Disclaimer: I dislike “devops” as a term in general. The tools and practices that are associated with “devops” however (puppet, chef, continuous deployment, automation of ops, etc) I am a very big fan of.

I’ve mentioned in the past how absolutely in love with Sonic.net I am. They’re by far the best ISP I’ve ever encountered and treat their users, especially technical ones, very well.

In less than seven days I will be standing behind a podium, giving a talk about Gerrit and Jenkins that is coming as a result of almost 2 years of integrating Gerrit into two separate companies, and almost 4 years of Jenkins. The fact that I’m speaking at the same time as Sacha Labourey (CEO of CloudBees) is just extra gravy on top of it all.

This past Saturday I had the (mis-)fortune of being signed up for the 2011 Cinderella Trail Run. EC (my wife) had signed up for the 10k race at the beginning of the summer to give her running a good goalpost to shoot for, and I agreed to run as well in order to help motivate her.

Our fancy new apartment, the one with the new oven, has two full-sized bed rooms and to full size bathrooms. We have one bathroom we shower and brush our teeth in, and one bathroom adjacent to the “office.” The second bathroom really just allows me a place to take a leak during late-night hack sessions in the “office,” without waking EC.

This past weekend I finally had a satisfyingly large chunk of free time that I could devote to hacking on various ideas, it was glorious.

(Note: this post by reddit user megadrive is responsible for the light-bulb clicking in my brain)

I ended this week with a visit to the California Academy of Sciences so technically, I learned quite a bit this past week. Saw some snakes, penguins, various clusters of small children, etc.

One easy way to learn a lot during a week is to attend a conference or workshop of some form or fashion. Surrounding yourself with people eager to share their knowledge means that even if you are plugging your ears and humming classic Spice Girls tunes, you still might just learn something.

I feel incredibly sheepish looking back over a week and not seeing that I’ve learned that much. Either I really haven’t, or I’ve neglected to write it down, either way I’m not pleased with myself.

Those who follow me on Twitter may have already seen this photo, but I wanted to share the story behind it.

An interesting part of the hiring process at Lookout is the candidate presentation. The presentation is meant to introduce the individual to the entire company while giving them an opportunity to wax poetic on a topic the person is passionate about.

This past week, despite moving apartments across Berkeley on Wednesday, I managed to learn some interesting things here and there.

I went to the impromptu redis SF meetup yesterday at Epicenter Cafe in SoMA and I figured I’d write up some notes about it after the fact.

Unfortunately I didn’t seem to learn that much this past week.

Following last week’s learnings, here’s another dose of little bits and pieces I’ve learned over the past week or so.

It is a little (unknown) fact that my first job as a software developer was writing C code, for the network group at Texas A&M University. Like most student developers, my work never saw the light of day, mostly because I never finished it, but I did learn an incredible amount working on my little project made for one.