Tag: Success And Scale Bring Broad Responsibility

Tunneling Through

Tunneling Through

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From time-to-time I have need to connect to VPNs, usually when doing work directly for one of my government partners. For a reason that utterly escapes me, Cisco hides its AnyConnect client behind a login that requires a license. And it’s a heavyweight install to boot. Ugh. I’d rather use a CLI; enter openconnect.

It can be a bit tricky to get the parameters right, so I put together a little helper script that abstracts some details, not the least of which is storing the VPN password in the local keyring for quick retrieval.

Posting it here for posterity. Enjoy!

Not An Option

Not An Option

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A big oops happened this weekend, and it has me thinking about failure. It’s a topic I’ve talked about before, but there’s plenty more that can be said.

Common leadership advice is to avoid making failure out to be a bad thing. “Failure is good,” well meaning folks will say. They’re not completely wrong, but they’re not absolutely right either.

Failure can only be good in moderation. Of course repeated failure of the same kind is bad. Absolutely learn from mistakes so they’re not repeated. But continually making new kinds of failure isn’t great either. No endeavor, professional or personal, can sustain that.

Eventually there need to be successes to offset the setbacks. So I’m not keen on over-celebrating failures, or treating failure as something that ought not have consequences. Maybe in the case of this CrowdStrike fiasco no one deserves to take the blame? But I doubt it.

Confessional

Confessional

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What they say: “I want to be respectful of your time.”

What they mean: “I’m tired of this conversation and want it to end.”

And by “they” I mean “me”.

Leap Day

Leap Day

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The world is a complex place. Time is hard, as evidenced by the plethora of things going wrong today. Naming is hard. Designing architectures is hard. Getting GenAI right is hard when the answers really matter.

And as it turns out, color is hard too! Did you know there are “imaginary colors”? I didn’t? How cool!

This is not an argument to run away from technology, but to say that we who do this work must be vigilant and realistic. The answer to “how long” is never “five minutes”. And we must engage across a broad set of disciplines, because our own perspectives are limited.

When confronted with complexity, the wrong answer is to retreat to comfortable simplicity. Read. Listen. Have an open mind and broaden your view of the world.

Fork In The Road

Fork In The Road

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Recently I got a Google reminder about a trip I took nine years ago. It was a business trip to the East Coast, and I remember it well, because it was at that meeting where I successfully convinced a customer that we needed to launch a large new development effort.

Little did I know at the time how the decisions made at that meeting would steer the direction of my next several years. And not just me, but our company, and the raft of individuals who we hired to work on the project. A handful of whom are still involved after all this time. And several whom I number amongst my friends.

The more I think about it, 10,000 people influenced over a lifetime is starting to sound like a low estimate. Our actions have real consequences. That’s a sobering thought, but also an inspiring one.

Resolution Recap

Resolution Recap

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Relaxing on a much-needed holiday has given me time to wrap up a couple books, bringing this year’s reading to a close (I’ve also finally started Alexander Hamilton, but no way I’m finishing it on my return flight; it’s good but long).

Per my meta-resolution, I aimed to read 44 books this year. I’m finishing at 48, though a few only barely qualify. Here’s this year’s 5-star selections:

How did I do in my objective to read more non-male, non-white authors? The goal was 32 books, and I finished with 14 non-male, 15 non-white, and 4 both, for a total of 33. Mission accomplished? Quantitatively yes, but qualitatively, the mission of broadening horizons is never done; this will continue to be a focus area.

What will I aim for next year (besides the obligatory quantity)? For one, I intend to read more history and biographies. Given my job, I also am going to do more reading on politics and government. Should be fun!

Mother Of Invention

Mother Of Invention

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More often than not, the tool you need to solve a particular programming problem has already been created and is easily discoverable via PyPI, npm, etc. I rejoice in these times.

Sometimes, however, the tool you need does not exist. Yet I still rejoice in these times, because they present an opportunity to create a new thing and share it with the world.

I’m thus here to announce sql-to-odata, a Python package containing tools to facilitate adding an OData interface in front of a SQL database. It’s limited right now to my specific use case (creating static extracts from SQLite), but if there ends up being broader interest, who knows what it might become.

Drama

Drama

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I don’t pretend to know everything that’s going on over at OpenAI, nor all the eventual lessons that will come from it, but unlike most tech-elite brouhahas this one might actually matter, as there’s a strong possibility taming artificial intelligence is “the final boss of humanity” (as one of the players in the ongoing saga has said).

Played around some yesterday with ChatGPT’s voice chats, and can totally see how we’re not far from deepening the emotional attachments to our devices. Her has never felt more prescient or likely. It’s mandatory viewing.

Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe

Keep It Secret, Keep It Safe

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AWS recently announced that blocking public access to published AMIs will be enabled by default. This is good news, as it’s an easy way to accidentally leak sensitive data. When I first started using GovCloud (2015 maybe?) I remember stumbling into a set of AMIs that, based on their names alone, clearly weren’t intended to be shared. Thankfully a quick note to AWS support and the offending party squared things away post haste, though I’ll never know if damage had already been done.

Horror stories are easily found online of the easiest way to make this mistake: turning on public access to an S3 bucket. Thankfully AWS has made taking this step difficult; in our internal accounts, in fact, without getting prior approval, creating a bucket with public access would get you a Sev-2 page in about 15 minutes. Unfun.

Which is why I found it so surprising to discover that in GCP, the only way I can tell to host a static website behind a CDN is to make the backing cloud storage bucket public. I mean, I recognize by definition it’s okay for the data to be Internet-accessible, but it meant turning off the “don’t allow public cloud storage” block project-wide, which seems a bad idea. Bad enough that the moment I hit that button I got a security warning via email. Am I missing something here? Would love to know if there’s a better way.

In any case, it’s going to be an adventure learning all these subtle differences as I broaden my cloud experience. Passing certifications is nice, but it’s no substitute for kicking the tires.

(Editor’s Note: I’m chuckling to myself as I add Amazon LP tags to a post that’s partly about GCP. Those things are burned into my brain forever).

Cerberus

Cerberus

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I’m coming up on six months since I took the CTO job at RIPL. Enough time to meet the team and get settled in, even bring a few tactical benefits that solve immediate needs. But the real work begins now, that of strategic planning that sets us up for long-term success.

Operating in a C-Suite is new to me. I don’t have a point of comparison, but so far it’s been great. Between the three of us we have a well-distributed set of skills and experiences, which means we can lean into our strengths while knowing the others have our blind spots covered. In many ways we’re operating as a coalition of equals more than a hierarchy; of course there’s deference when required, but the level of mutual trust is such that it doesn’t really come up often. And I genuinely enjoy the company (in both senses of the term). Not sure if this is rare or common, but I’m grateful either way.

Perhaps this is how the best leadership teams operate, more like a unified whole than a siloed set of individuals? It’s an idea worth exploring further; the Freakonomics episode Are Two CEOs Better Than One is probably where I’ll start.

A corollary to the above, especially given I’m the oldest person in the group (a fact worthy of its own post), is that finding mentorship from professionals with more experience in my role means that I have to look to sources outside my employer. It’s why I’m trying to build a better professional network through activities like starting 4S Tech, attending CTO Lunches, joining the Rand Leadership Slack, and taking a tech ethics class. I consider these efforts part of my job, because I owe it to my company to develop myself further.