unfinished.bike

What if you could easily reduce the length of outages by 3X?

According to the SRE book, “recording the best practices ahead of time in a playbook produces roughly a 3x improvement in MTTR”. This improvement mirrors my experience with well-written playbooks.

So what makes a playbook entry “great”?

In my experience as a software engineer and a software engineering manager, I’ve found that the best way to motivate software engineers is with empathy, purpose, and a sense of craftsmanship. Conversely, the most effective way to demotivate a software engineering team over the long term is with excessive process and deadlines.

Let’s dive a little bit deeper into the levers I’ve found that work in motivating software engineers into doing their best work:

Ever wanted to run Docker on an unmanned macOS machine, where all users could have access to a working Docker command-line?

First, be aware that docker is not designed to be securely shared among multiple users. As with Linux, Please assume that anyone who has access to docker is effectively equivalent to `root'.

I wanted to get my feet wet with understanding Kaniko, an open-source in-cluster builder for Docker images. I happen to work with one of the maintainers, Tejal, and I asked her if there was any interesting UNIX-internals sort of bugs that might be interesting.

Here's the mystery issue: “The USER command does not set the correct gids, so extra groups are dropped”. Here's an example to reproduce it: