When learning a new recipe, especially when dabbling in cuisine from different cultures, I find it really important to make sure one is really precise in their understanding the words used in the recipe. I've had a few unfortunate misunderstandings that resulted in... gastronomic disaster.

Similarly, I find that I can't responsibly use the word "DevOps" without testing that the person I'm talking to know which meaning I'm using. Here's some examples of what someone may think I mean when I say "DevOps":

Every once in a while, some new product comes along that solves a problem you didn't know you had, and does it so well that after you've had it, you can't imagine how you ever lived without it.

This is how I've come to feel about Karpenter. I guess you could say that the category it lives in already existed, given it's designed to replace the Kubernetes Cluster Autoscaler, but the effect it's had on my life as an EKS cluster operator and platform engineer makes me feel like the comparison cheapens it.

Most mornings, after pulling myself out of bed, I put some semblance of a breakfast together. While eating, I usually take in the news (via the Android app of a traditional newspaper). I timebox this to about 10 minutes, which fits my breakfast-eating pace, and balances my desire to be an educated, responsible citizen with my tolerance for the existential dread I'm going to feel after reading about US politics.

Once I'm sufficiently fed/educated/terrified, I head over to the couch, where the dog joins me for a cuddle while I sip my coffee. At this point, I usually switch over to Hacker News. I've found that Hacker News is a pretty reliable purveyor of articles on topics that overlap my interests. I also appreciate that it gives me an nudge to get outside my go-to subjects, into pretty niche topics in tech, science, math, culture, philosophy (and interesting people who recently died) - all with a taint of delightful nerdiness.

For those of you who knew me as a painter (up until about 1999), you may be confused to hear that I quit painting completely and I'm now working as a software engineer.

So here's the deal: My junior year in college at Cooper Union (an art school), after having already spent close to 7 years painting seriously, I went online for the first time- did some email, played around on the web. I decided in order to prevent myself from becoming a total Luddite, I should learn some stuff about using computers to make art. So I started with photoshop, a little illustrator and flash. After a semester, it occurred to me that this might lead to a reasonably comfortable day job to help support my painting habit.