Carl Chesser

Last week was the legendary KCDC conference in Kansas City. This was the first year that DevOpsDays KC combined with the event. It was a full-day event on Wednesday, which was paired with other workshops, before the sessions on Thursday and Friday. Right when I first arrived at the conference on Wednesday, I saw friends I hadn’t seen in over a year. Conferences like this are such a rich ground for networking. While we all enjoy going to the talks, the unique value in these events is connecting with people. DevOpsDays KC has a concept of open spaces, where there is a dedicated time window that people post discussion topics, and then form tables with different topics that people can join and discuss a topic. You can quickly connect with others on different topics by discussing the problem and sharing ideas on solutions in this space. I enjoyed the networking and time with others as part of DevOpsDays KC, and then other open times (like breakfast and lunch) during the conference to further meet and talk with others. Living and working in Kansas City, this conference enables you to meet and see other professionals in the area, while also connecting with others from all over the world.

Documenting Repairs # Life is busy. Outside of the typical workday, a recurring time investment of mine revolves around repairing mechanical things. Things that are not of the software world, but things that naturally decay and fail based on environmental factors. As we age, it is easy to accumulate more things, which require maintenance or diagnosing to repair. This spawns growing TODO lists, and scheduled reminders on things to inspect and replace. While this blog has been a place where I have previously shared notes and thoughts about software development, I thought I would start adding notes on random things I have had to diagnose or repair. Some of these things are quite simple and thought it would be of value to share as I couldn’t find anything online and answered my problem.

DevOpsDays KC returned this week since 2019! It was awesome to see so many faces I hadn’t seen in years. It was a nice two days, at the Madrid Theathre, local food trucks for lunch, and great discussions.

I wanted to discuss a term that I found memorable recently: ground truth. It resonated with me when I first heard it, as I’m routinely in discussions where we are articulating technical problems and how we plan to solve them. This act of describing the problem to an audience with varying levels of understanding can be challenging. We often have limited time in how we bring people to shared understanding. This restricts our ability to sufficiently describe all the history and contributing factors of that problem. By having a close understanding to what is occurring, the better we can articulate this understanding with others. In this post, I will dig into the term “ground truth” and some considerations in the words we use when sharing this understanding.

Over the last year, I have found myself trying to establish new routines. With working more from home, I wanted to make subtle changes in different aspects in my life. For example, I previously used to enjoy podcasts on my drive to work. Now, I focus on listening to these while I do chores around the house. In this blog post, I will share how I found an effective way of establishing a new habit through something simple which happens to have science behind it. I hope this is helpful if you are looking at ways to be effective in new habit building too.