Blog

Random thoughts on technology, teams, and leadership. Content from defunct blogs and companies will be added from time to time. Opinions expressed here are my own.

Latest Post

Sep 24, 2025

The Metrics Game: When Toxic Leadership Comes Full Circle

There’s a particular breed of toxic leader that seems to thrive in operations departments. These leaders mistake authority for leadership and confuse control for competence. From the top down, they give the appearance of success because they control the narrative for their groups, supported by charts full of quantifiable data showing how great they’re doing. Operations groups are particularly susceptible to this type of leader because they encompass some of the most measurable aspects of IT: infrastructure operations, support functions, and data center buildouts. Read more

All Posts

2025

  • Sep 24, 2025 - The Metrics Game: When Toxic Leadership Comes Full Circle
  • Sep 2, 2025 - Marketing Fluff: What Tech People Really Mean (and How to Avoid It)
  • Aug 28, 2025 - From Line Cook to Chef: Lessons for Presales Engineering
  • Aug 2, 2025 - Leaders Who Fail Up: The LinkedIn Rebrand of Failure
  • Aug 1, 2025 - Running Slurm and Flux on Oxide: Dual HPC Schedulers in Your Own Rack
  • Jul 15, 2025 - PXE Booting on Oxide
  • Jun 12, 2025 - Printed on 24 lb. Paper
  • Jun 10, 2025 - Everything Is Political: Embrace It
  • May 23, 2025 - ‘This Is Just How We Do Things Now’: The Quiet Collapse of Standards
  • May 13, 2025 - Find a New Band
  • Feb 21, 2025 - The Fence We Keep Ignoring
  • 2024

  • Dec 23, 2024 - The Parable of the Slow-Boiled Frog
  • Aug 13, 2024 - Managing Kubernetes Contexts with kubectx
  • Apr 18, 2024 - Mirroring Github to Gitlab…Without Premium
  • Apr 15, 2024 - Of NGINX and Pianos
  • Feb 7, 2024 - Cleaner Dockerfiles with HEREDOC
  • Jan 22, 2024 - Adding Trivy to Harbor
  • Jan 7, 2024 - Setting up Harbor as a Local Docker Registry
  • 2023

  • Sep 10, 2023 - Installing the Official NGINX OSS via Ansible Playbook
  • Aug 7, 2023 - Installing the Official NGINX OSS Package via Script
  • Aug 1, 2023 - Breaking Down Silos
  • Jul 14, 2023 - Proxmox LXC and Terraform
  • Jul 13, 2023 - Setting Up Devboxen With Ansible
  • Jul 5, 2023 - Proxmox VMs and Terraform
  • Jun 25, 2023 - Building Proxmox Templates via Script
  • Jun 22, 2023 - Convergent and Divergent Thinking
  • Jun 14, 2023 - Systems and the Cobra Effect
  • Jun 13, 2023 - Umpires
  • Jun 12, 2023 - Situational Awareness
  • Jun 9, 2023 - Back Online