Fixing up a Petster Penguin!

Learn about the adorable Petster Penguin, a later revision of the Catster. Discover its unique features, including a “Go Play” switch and waddling motion. Dive into the internals and find out how to fix its movement problem.

Fixing a broken Axlon Petster

Discover how I restored a broken Petster from the 1980s. Learn about the common gear issue and how to fix it yourself with replacement gears. 🐱💜

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 … Read more

An Exercise in Finding Gaps

Silly example timeline of the server-side software lifecycle

Last week, I led my team in an exercise to discover the mis-matches between us and our new boss, following a re-org. Find out how it helped us!

Page-out Meetings

Learn how a “Page-Out Meeting” can prevent unnecessary 3am alerts. Discover effective strategies to reduce pages and improve team sleep.

Customer Postmortems

Discover the importance of writing customer postmortems after downtime incidents to maintain goodwill and improve communication with customers. Learn how to get started and when to write a postmortem.

Tools of the Trade: The Basics

Discover the tools used by operation engineers in their day-to-day workflow, from accessing servers to managing confidential data. Find out why mosh is preferred over SSH and learn about the essential tools used on local machines, such as iTerm 2.

Heya!

April White

Welcome to my blog! As a Systems Engineer in operations, I’ll be sharing insights into the often-crazy lifestyle of keeping things up and running 24/7. Join me as I focus on the human side of operations and share what I’m personally doing as an engineer. Let’s make it entertaining and educational!