tl;dr Built a custom keyboard cuz I have weirdo nerve pain issues. Learned a lot cuz I failed a lot. Maybe 'do it right the first time' is a bad frame of mind. The keyboard ended up being kinda nifty. It has lights, and a trackball, and QMK, and it helps my issues. \o/ ( tl;dr is internet lingo that means, too long; didn't read ) Pain as a key ingredient An old proverb says, 'necessity is the mother of invention', and that is how this story begins. Over the last few years, age or stress or something has caught up with me and I developed the need to change my human-to-computer interface. Mousing changed to trackballing. The traditional keyboard was swapped out for an ergonomic, and then split keyboard. Complicated multi-finger-and-hand key combinations were replaced by single keypress macros. And yet more was still needed. It's often said that change only happens with pain - indeed, the organizations many of us work in seem to apply this as law - an
I'm writing this more to clear my head than anything else. If it helps someone, great. We have measured significant 'release impact' when deploying one of our core applications. The main problem is initialization/warmup of the appPool. We've tried the built-in methods, but for whatever reason we are always stuck with ~25s of dead time while the first request warms things up (we assume it's warming things up, not really sure what is happening). After that 25s wait things are very snappy and fast, so how do we prevent all of our web servers from going into 25s of dead time with production traffic inbound? Starting point - why do this? We care about our customers, and we want to help drive our business forward with as much quality/safety/speed as possible. Because we want to drive our business forward, we are pushing to do more and more deploys ( currently we do a daily deploy, but want to see 5x that ) ( if you have to ask why we want 5x, read this ).
Over the last year I've spent a lot of time learning (thank you, long commute & lunch hours). Many topics ranging from Chef to DevOps to architecture concepts to management concepts and everything in between. Why have I done this? DevOps Demystified with Ben Rockwood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5E--QSBVBY DevOps at ancestry.com: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pF5ya0q53kk Those two presentations were key in sending me down this road. First, and most important, was Mr. Rockwood's explanation as to the real 'why', and the point behind DevOps from an operational perspective. Second, and no less important but for a different reason, the continuous delivery system at ancestry.com really made it real to me because they are a 'Windows shop'. So much of what I'd been reading about Chef/config mgmt. relied on amazing tools (see the error there?) only available to the Linux world. Suddenly here's this guy telling me that it's possible on
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