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Failure is not an option! It might surprise you to know that this quote wasn't real - it feels legendary, but was never said by Gene Kranz. It was written up for the film. The aerospace engineering discipline isn't really something everybody gets to experience, so it makes sense that "spicing things up" for …
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It's difficult to start a new software project Documentation Depending on how a software project starts, it can either be the easiest or the hardest aspect of a new project. Documentation suffers from a similar issue, so a good place to get things moving would be to simplify the basics of repository management. Here's …
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Patience is tough when deploying automated code; Here's why it is important Reliability-centric infrastructure engineers need to focus on careful, procedural, validated workflows; the systems we're responsible are simply too important to casually "toss" infrastructure requests at a common API gateway. We …
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Python's Virtual Environments Feature presents a unique opportunity with CI/CD tooling - where users congregate to publish and execute code of their own devising. Developers might use different versions of the same package (creating dependency conflicts), or they might simply need a newer version of a package than is …
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API Interactions are designed to be easy Believe it or not, the IT infrastructure industry is trying to make things easier by building API access out. Programmatic interfaces are a new mental model competing for brain-space with GUI and CLI implementations; we need to play to its strengths: Parsing output from a …
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Note: This post integrates several automation tools at once. My objective is to provide some well-documented, concrete examples of executable Ansible Playbooks, D2 Diagrams, and best practice to illustrate ways to make good documentation easy. Note: All code examples in this blog post are structured in a format to be …
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Let's do something a bit more stereotypical when we talk about IT diagramming - building Network Diagrams with D2. D2's OSS layout engines (Dagre, ELK) are both centered around hierarchical layouts, which was a bit part of why we needed to hack D2 to get vSphere diagrams to draw. Here, it quickly becomes our best …
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In a previous post we tested methods to illustrate documentation as-code with Terrastruct's D2 language. Documentation is good for infrastructure engineers in a variety of scenarios practically speaking, but we often forget the value of building consumer confidence. This may vary based on culture! My experiences are …
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Documentation is always important, but always takes too much time Ever had an issue where a new installation is completed, but there's just no time to update the ol' Visio diagrams? Manually composed diagrams always possess a certain art to them, but the hours per unit of documentation isn't always worthwhile …
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