Forrest Brazeal @forrestbrazeal Twitter profile

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

new little song: "The Re-Org Rag (I'm My Own VP)"

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

Facebook employees are now "Metamates". (?) Can't wait for: LinkedIn -> Inmates Amazon -> Primates Tinder -> Intimates Jira -> Underestimates Postmates -> Postmatemates

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

good morning and welcome to 2023

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

I'll never forget asking a guy who maintained 40yo mainframes for an insurance co why he didn't just migrate the apps. His reply: the firm's actuarial code relies on specific bugs in the mainframe OS's floating-point handling. Run on any other system, it would produce chaos.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Absolutely fascinating insight I just heard from a hiring manager: Adding junior engineers makes the senior engineers on his team *better*, because the constant "Why" questions force them to articulate and confront their own assumptions. Hire juniors for a stronger team!

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Finally, a use for math! "The Ransomware Song"

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

it's the little things...

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Dear intern: We've all screwed something up, So welcome to the club. "That Sinking Feeling (The #HugOps Song)"

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

The recent "All the ways to run containers on AWS" threads have left me super confused so I made this flowchart to help. It's probably also wrong.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Good morning. here's another Probably Wrong Flowchart, this time on AWS database services!

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

I’m a W, how about you?

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

This shouldn't be possible, period. There needs to be an easy, safe way for students to explore AWS without incurring unexpected megacharges.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Today in things that nobody stopped me from doing: The AWS Elastic Load Balancer Yodel Rag.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

10 days

every acquisition announcement from a tech company

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 years

finally learned what SRE stands for "Sysadmin (Really Expensive)"

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

output of every "2021 roadmap" meeting happening this week

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

Did someone say "AIOps"?

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

On Monday, I'll be starting a new adventure as head of content at @googlecloud . Beyond excited for this chance to tell the story of the cloud at the biggest scale yet, in partnership with a visionary and brilliant group of colleagues.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

Seriously, who called it "open source" and not "anyware"?

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 months

I drew this 12 months ago, as LLM code assistants were just becoming available. Has it held up?

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

An ode to Infinidash - the imaginary AWS service!

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 years

In three days, I’m gonna drop something that should pretty much break AWS Twitter.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

Listen up, Silicon Valley… “Hardcore Engineer”

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

good morning and welcome to 2022

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

on-premiseseseses

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

people who used to work at postmates: post-postmatesmates

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

We can't all be 2-pizza teams...

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

Just saying.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 years

it's amazing to me how the average cloud security review is both paranoid and totally inadequate.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

How to digital transformation (The Butterfly Song)

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

Overheard in enterprise IT

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

OK. Here are ten things I freakin’ love about Google Cloud’s approach to identity / accounts.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

@Jira Surely it would be Vegemates.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

Lately I’m seeing people defend the lack of junior cloud engineer positions by saying “cloud isn’t an entry-level job.” If that’s true, it’s quite an indictment of our industry, isn’t it?

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

24 days

This one made sense in my head.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

aww I forgot I drew this one

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 years

I wish more CTOs understood that a "lift-and-shift" cloud migration is not a stepping stone to a better architecture; it's a delay tactic. And an expensive one.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

This one goes out to all the serious professional tech people whose Personal Website is a janky Jekyll blog last updated in 2014

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

I've been trying to figure out why this particular Discord message shook me so badly today. And I just realized why. Scaring inexperienced young ppl into thinking they owe large sums of money - even if it's ultimately not true - is a life&death matter.

Alex Kearns died thinking he owed hundreds of thousands for stock market losses on Robinhood. His...

In the wrongful death suit, Alex Kearns' parents accuse the company of targeting unsophisticated traders like their son.

www.cbsnews.com

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Hey AWS engineers! A friend's company is hiring a bunch of you. Fully remote, US-based, and they are open to folks who want to do part-time consulting as well as FTE. Very cool projects - serverless, IoT, etc. DM for an intro.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

If I'm looking for a job 5 years from now, I'll be looking closely at how well $prospective_company retained staff between 2020 and 2022. Anybody who's keeping their team happy and loyal right now, after the year we've all had, is doing something really right.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 years

Life goal unlocked: I just walked into a random Barnes & Noble and found my own book on the shelf. No words to describe that feeling.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

This song is dangerous @googlecloud propaganda. Definitely don't watch all the way to the very end. "Look At You Now" (The Google Cloud Song)

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

CORS is a four-letter word

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

The term "skills gap" is a rhetorical trick that shifts the blame onto newbies. The actual problem is an "experience gap"; and that puts the blame right back on the industry for not providing onramps to experience for juniors.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Wrote up a small rant about this. You can't expand access to the cloud until you can let newbies learn without jeopardizing their personal well-being.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 years

Evolution of operations

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

You can take the people out of the data center, but how do you take the data center out of the people?

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 months

I’m leaving Google Cloud at the end of this week. Working at Google was something I’d dreamed of doing since I was 11. I met many great people in my 2.5 years there and got a taste of the complexity / impact of solving problems at hyperscale. Grateful & excited for what's next!

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

My usual beef with reference architectures is that they launder the creators' assumptions into "best practices" without helping you put your own needs in context. Turns out there's a cheat code to get past this problem, and the team that built "Emblem Giving" found it:

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

@fchollet

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 years

The 4 Horsemen of Serverless on AWS: * Lambda * IAM * DynamoDB * S3 Understand how to build and automate these 4 foundational services, know their docs backward and forward, and you can move the world.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

I know #hugops causes some people to roll their eyes, but the Log4j thing is the reason it exists. A whole bunch of people are doing stupid amounts of stressful firefighting to protect us from a problem that they didn't cause. Thank you, ops teams. ❤️

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

I met a guy today who is transitioning from pest control to cybersecurity, and I think this may rival "commercial plumber -> DevOps engineer" as my all-time favorite tech origin story.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

The Buzzword Boogie (a cautionary tale)

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Some have pointed out the existence of AWS Educate Starter Accounts, which provide no-credit-card access to a limited subset of services. Only via participating educational institutions, though. Opening this up to all learners would be a huge step fwd.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

The recent Roald Dahl thing is a reminder that if you care about your kids having access to great books, a physical home library is a smart investment. This is our kids’ collection, scrounged from Goodwill, library sales, etc - you can do this cheaply but the payoffs compound.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Unless something changes systemically at AWS, we should expect future Kinesis Incidents, and we should expect them to be progressively bigger in scope and harder to resolve. My analysis of AWS's postmortem and the path forward:

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

5 years

I have no regrets. The Serverless vs Containers Rap Battle:

Serverless v Containers

World renowned serverless hero and aspiring rapper, Forrest Brazeal, brings us the latest song to take over the tech/cloud/serverless rap wold. Watch and lis...

www.youtube.com

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

My favorite question to ask the hiring manager when interviewing for a job: "Can you tell me about a bad day your team recently had, and how you responded to it?" Reveals so much about so. much. Every time.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

@sarah_edo I feel this deeply, and wrote about it:

When programming is gone, will we like what's left?

Be careful what you wish for.

newsletter.goodtechthings.com

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

5 years

AWS: “we don’t need developer advocates for IAM” Me: *clarifies for yet another client the difference between an IAM user “account” and an AWS account*

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Have to admit I got a little teary-eyed after @werner 's #reinvent keynote ... here's a small, seasonal update to the S3 Ballad for the occasion. Big props to the AWS teams for everything you've built this year!

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 months

Today is my last day of full-time employment (at least for the foreseeable future). I’ve been working toward this day for a long time, since I was an 18yo kid driving an IT service car covered in vehicle wrap. Now I get the chance to do my own thing, on my terms. Surreal.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

5 things I've learned the hard way about multi-region / multi-cloud: 1. Building your own control plane, whether cross-region or cross-cloud, involves cost and complexity that you will have to deal with every day - not just when a managed service has downtime.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

I've started to feel like the term "skills gap" is putting the blame in the wrong place...

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

What is hybrid cloud, if not legacy vendors persevering?

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Initial reaction to the way Google Cloud organizes projects and identities: I really, really like it.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 years

The real heroes here are the ACG video editors who painstakingly animated ALL THE SERVICE ICONS 🙏

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Microservices: dubious since 3000 BC

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

5 years

So, for the first 45 minutes of this #reInvent session I was nodding my head like "Yup, that's how I think about DynamoDB." Then Rick morphed into some kind of NoSQL wizard from outer space and my mind exploded. Absolute must watch:

AWS re:Invent 2018: Amazon DynamoDB Deep Dive: Advanced Design...

This session is for those who already have some familiarity with DynamoDB. The patterns and data models discussed in this session summarize a collection of i...

www.youtube.com

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

Not all "utilization" is created equal...

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

5 years

This AWS war story is amazing, and perfectly illustrates the point I made in yesterday's newsletter. There is RADICAL labor savings (read $ savings) in the cloud if you commit to architecting properly.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 years

From a salary + opportunities standpoint, learning to write has been worth >2x more to my career than learning to code. In tech, code is table stakes. Effective writing and speaking set you apart.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

@mikefiedler in this case, the bugs literally were a feature.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

"what if we train our people, and then they leave?"

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

I've finally achieved my dream of combining "Schoolhouse Rock" and cloud. Enjoy "I'm Goin' To Production" (the Software Supply Chain Song) - ideally on the biggest speakers possible.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

5 years

This is super interesting: AWS open-sourcing something close to the actual project layout, code, and ops config they use to run a serverless service in prod. Def. recommend reading the Github repo. Some surprises. May write up longer takeaway shortly...

How AWS built a production service using serverless technologies | Amazon Web Services

Our customers are constantly seeking ways to increase agility and innovation in their organizations, and often reach out to us wanting to learn more about how we iterate quickly on behalf of our...

aws.amazon.com

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

After an incredible journey to acquisition, today is my last day at @acloudguru . Meeting Sam, Drew, and Pete at ServerlessConf Austin in 2017 changed my life. I will forever be grateful to have been a small part of one of the great teams in cloud.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 years

Introducing the #CloudResumeChallenge . I'm volunteering my network to help you get your first job in the cloud. But I can only share a certain kind of resume. Thread ->

The cloud resume challenge · Forrest Brazeal

Send me your resume, and I will do my best to help you get a job in the cloud. (Some conditions apply.)

forrestbrazeal.com

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

The reason people don’t hire juniors onto cloud teams is the same as it’s always been. Not because the job is too hard for juniors, but because the job of apprenticing and growing them is too hard for YOU.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

oh no

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

I just don't buy this take that AI is going to decrease the absolute need for software engineers. AI is going to generate SO MUCH CODE. We are entering a post-scarcity world for code. We have nowhere near enough engineers to edit, harden, maintain all the code AIs will generate.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 months

People are out here pitching devtools to enterprises like "this will make your workflow easier and faster", and I'm like ... have you MET an enterprise?

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Somebody called @shanselman the Bob Ross of programming and now that's all I can think of. What he's doing with TikTok is brilliant. Humanity, earnestness and digital know-how - the great attributes of Gen Z - wrapped up in 60-second packages.

SwiftOnSecurity

@SwiftOnSecurity

3 years

So wholesome @shanselman

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

@dalmaer Perhaps this will "help"...

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

I vote we retire the term "non-technical" as a way to define non-software engineers. The Excel wizard in your accounting dept or the CRO maven on the marketing team are as digitally-literate and automation-savvy as any programmer. They just have less ego about it.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

In the wake of The Kinesis Incident, I’d love to see AWS commit to a full audit of their internal service dependency tree and related assumptions. This write up, great as it is, does not give confidence in the blast radius of future cascading failures being less severe.

%FIRST NAME%

@rchrdbyd

3 years

A detailed review of Wednesday's outage has been published.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

Google moving its own products to Google Cloud is *extremely* good news for @googlecloud customers. Really interested to see this unfold.

Drew Bradstock

@dbradstock

2 years

I'm hiring an experienced Product Manager to lead Google's investment in moving Alphabet & many Google products to Google Cloud. It is a fascinating role that will shape the future of Cloud. Role says Canada but anywhere in North America is good.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

Next-gen Google Cloud Functions just dropped. Most interesting to me: this version is built on top of Google Cloud Run. Stay tuned for a behind-the-scenes deep dive on this architecture soon.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

People who are fluent on more than one cloud provider - how has this skillset affected your career? Does it mostly just expand your job opportunities (ie, you can get hired by a GCP shop or an AWS shop), or do you find yourself working with multiple clouds at your current job?

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 years

Hey, I am HIRING for multiple roles on my team at @acloudguru . If you have a background in tech and a knack for journalism, I want to talk to you. DMs open.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Another blog I need to write up soon: "Why every engineer should do a stint in consulting." • Enforces clear communication, esp. in docs • Builds empathy for user needs • Reveals the business impact of code • Improves "mean time to competence" on new skills

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

1 year

@JoeEmison To be clear, I don’t think he was giving me an excuse for why the code couldn’t be refactored - he was explaining why it couldn’t be lifted&shifted as-is.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

3 years

Getting to play a small role in stories like this is what keeps me involved in tech. Here's a breakdown of how a plumber with zero cloud experience got hired off of the most compelling entry-level resume I've ever seen:

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

5 years

"Serverless computing will become the default computing paradigm of the Cloud Era." Here is a rare academic paper that everybody in the industry should read:

Cloud Programming Simplified: A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing - RISE Lab

David Patterson and Ion Stoica The publication of “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing” on February 10, 2009 cleared up the considerable confusion about the new notion of “Cloud...

rise.cs.berkeley.edu

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

30 days

Hardest line ever dropped in a keynote livetweet.

Corey Quinn

@QuinnyPig

30 days

The fundamental error all of these GenAI use cases make is in assuming that people will want to read something that other people couldn't be bothered to write.

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

2 years

Enterprise architect: There should be no manual access to production except in a "break glass" emergency situation On-call engineer:

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Forrest Brazeal

@forrestbrazeal

4 years

Still thinking about @mipsytipsy ’s Future of Ops talk. What really stood out: great engineers are a product of great teams, not vice versa. Within 3-6 months, even the brightest new hire usually rises/falls to the level of the surrounding system. This hurts, but rings true.

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