If you’ve met me for more than a few minutes you’ve heard me talk about my passion project, Leave the House Out of It (lthoi.com). If you’ve really paid attention to my blog posts you’ve caught that a couple years ago I rearchitected the app to move to an event-based, serverless architecture on AWS. After a year of not doing very much with the project I’ve had the itch to make some upgrades. Before I did, I wanted to upgrade the CI/CD pipeline I use to manage the code.
Author Archives: Jonathan Cavell
Book Review: Thank You for Being Late, by Thomas Friedman
The word “optimist” in the subtitle is very well earned here. Friedman’s book explains why/how someone can hope that the same technologies and macro-trends that are leading to hyper-nationalism, extreme divisiveness, and massive pollution might actually be harnessed for good. He tells that story with his typical great story telling and insightful anecdotes. As usual […]
Takeaways From 2021 State of DevOps
Why the State of DevOps is such a good report to read each year and what the takeaways are for 2021.
Book Review: Mindset by Carol Dweck
I can usually tell by 15 pages in to a self-help book whether it’s going to resonate with me; usually, it’s not going to. I can’t stand being told about how much I can get done in the morning if I start at 3am or that if I work 10x harder than everyone else it […]
Book Review: Invent and Wander (collected Jeff Bezos)
Jeff Bezos built a company that’s worth about the same on the stock market ($1.67T) as the entire circulating supply of Pakistani Ruppees ($1.68T). That means you could BARELY trade every Pakistani Rupee in existence for all the stock in Amazon. I guess I’ll read some of his wisdom and see what he has to […]
Book Review: Promised Land by Barack Obama
I rarely bother to post books I read for pleasure on the blog, but I thought that a lot of the people that I know professionally may be interested in this one. I started reading it in November when we were just starting to be able to think about what a post-Trump America might look […]
Book Review: Ahead in the Cloud by Stephen Orban
I found a lot of great nuggets in this book, but I’m not sure I’d recommend it to everyone. If you’re trying to sell your boss on a move to AWS, definitely give her this book. If you’re trying to figure out what your IT priorities are, I’d recommend Leading the Transformation or The Pheonix […]
2021 New Years Resolutions
2020 was a year where I expected to just entrench and work on establishing myself at IBM. It was a really good year for that, and (thanks to a lack of travel and a bit of a COVID slow period) also allowed me to set some pretty ambitious fitness goals. That leaves me feeling pretty […]
Book Review: Leading the Transformation by Gruver & Mouser
If you’ve read much of Gene Kim’s work you’ve heard of the transformation that HP Printers made to their firmware development process. Kim cites it so frequently because it is an example of one of the oldest software development groups around making software that’s some of the hardest software to test (printer emulators anyone?) transforming […]
Book Review: Value Stream Mapping: How to Visualize Work by Karen Martin
I confess, Value Stream Mapping as a technique is something I already do with clients and I was reading this book mostly to make sure that I could say that I did (and now it’s on the Internet!). I will say that after being taught value stream mapping primarily as it relates to the DevOps […]