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Fixing up a Petster Penguin!
Today I fixed up a Petster Penguin! I’d never seen one before, so I wasn’t really sure how it’s suppose to work. Turns out, it’s super adorable! The Petster Penguin looks like a later revision of the Catster internally. It has the later revision of the battery door (the batteries go in vertically, rather than […]
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Fixing a broken Axlon Petster
I recently picked up this Petster off of eBay! The listing said it was broken. It made noise, and you could hear the motors running, but the Petster itself didn’t move. I’ve seen this failure mode before, so I figured I’d grab it and see if I could restore it back to operating. Taking a […]
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Quick Review of Inovelli’s LZW45 Light Strip
I’m looking for a pair of light strips I can use to make cool effects in my house! Since I have a lot of other Inovelli gear, I figured I’d start with their LZW45 light strip first. Adding it to my ZWave network was basically like every other Inovelli device. Set the hub to inclusion […]
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An Exercise in Finding Gaps
A post about an exercise I did with my team following a re-org to discover gaps in expectations and knowledge.
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Page-out Meetings
You know what’s worse than getting paged at 3am? Getting paged at 3am for something you can’t fix. One of the best tools in my toolkit as the manager of an ops team to prevent these is what we call a “Page-Out Meeting.” This is a meeting where myself a few of my team members […]
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Recruiting via GitHub and Unintentional Biases
I would like to talk about unintentional basis for a moment. The above chart is my own commit history (on my personal account) on GitHub right now. Not a single one. Pretty terrible, right? Some people in our industry think so. I linked to this blog post only because it’s the most recent one I […]
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Customer Postmortems
So you’ve had some downtime. Your customers were impacted for an extended period of time. You’re most likely are already writing a postmortem that’s circulated internally, but what about writing one for your customers, too? A History Lesson I work on a legacy product that’s been around for over a decade. When our product was […]
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Tools of the Trade: The Basics
This is the first in what I think will be a regular thing on Ops n’ Lops, a look at the toolset that I use! This post is going to feature the basic tools that I use every single day to access servers. Opsen are a fickle group when it comes to our tools, and I […]
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Heya!
Hi! Something I have been wanting to do for YEARS now is start a blog where I can talk about my professional life! I have lots of outlets for personal things, but nothing about my career. Thus, this blog has been born. I’m a Systems Engineer that works for a Bay Area tech company in […]