Managing your time in high performant organizations.
OR
"Does your spouse log on to work after the kids go to bed?"
A thread.
Unlike some of my other threads, this will be:
- A little more unstructured
- Written over time (usually I write the threads as a draft and release it all at once)
Oct 26, 2021 • 81 tweets • 12 min read
A curated list of some of my favorite quotes.
Sometimes with attribution and sometimes without.
A thread.
On growing up: “At 16 I thought my father was the dumbest man alive. At 21 I couldn’t believe how much wisdom he acquired in 5 short years.” -Mark Twain
Aug 30, 2021 • 33 tweets • 7 min read
After almost 15 years of working in technology as an SRE (before it was even called that), here is a list of things that I wish I had at every firm I’ve worked at.
OR
How to be the best tech firm you can be.
A thread.
1. If you have a system that used complicated logic to route/classify/process information, spend the extra day or two at design time to have it output in PLAIN ENGLISH what happened for a given transaction.
How to do a "make vs buy" decision when you have zero data.
aka "What running professional paintball tournaments at Disney World taught me".
A thread.
So back in the mid 2000's, I was the General Manager for a professional paintball league called Paintball Sports Promotions (PSP).
To give people a sense of scale, here is a picture of our biggest event in 2006, the World Cup:
Jul 6, 2020 • 11 tweets • 3 min read
How to build an army of top quality people via Amazon Mechanical Turk. Yes, you read correctly, Mechanical Turk (henceforth referred to as MT).
A thread.
Most people think of MT as "that thing Amazon offers where you have a lot of work that you need humans to do where you pay per task and it works out to be below min wage".
Because they have that mental model they automatically equate MT to "low quality" which is wrong...
Jun 9, 2020 • 26 tweets • 6 min read
Back in the early 2000's, I worked for a firm that was responsible for investigating TV Smart Card hacking for a major satellite provider.
Here are some of the highlights of how we tracked and caught some of the hackers.
A thread.
So for those of you not familiar with how satellite TV worked back then here is some background.
- The provider would "beam" a stream of data (e.g. TV channels etc) from a ground station up to a geosynchronous satellite
- Geosynch was important as you target a country/region
Bash often gets ignored in today's cloud centric world but there is a lot of cool stuff you can do just with basic commands, the switches on those commands and piping things together.
To the command line!
So I'm going to start out with some of the more basic commands and some switches that people aren't familiar with and then rapidly get more advanced in both usage and stringing commands together.
Never done this on Twitter before so should be exciting!
Feb 11, 2020 • 29 tweets • 7 min read
Great thread from @SwiftOnSecurity so read that first. Then you can come back and read some of my thoughts on the subject. A thread.
1. Over the last 13 years I have been involved in lots of outages with almost all of them being in finance. The financial loss has ranged from $0 to $X00,000+. You can read about some of them here:
How I learned to love writing tech documentation and how you can get other people to love it too (including yourself).
A thread.
I’ll do this by laying out misconception that people have about documentation and talk about why it’s not true and how you can fix it and change people’s attitudes.
Jan 29, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
@Shetsans @AccidentalCISO Step 1: Figure out what Management cares about and if they reward people for giving them what they ask for. EVERYTHING flows from this.
@Shetsans @AccidentalCISO How to tell: run an experiment! e.g. pick something they say they care about and ask something like "hey, $Y seems very important to you, if I can get $Y done, can I get small thing $X". Then do $Y and see what happens.
Jan 12, 2020 • 22 tweets • 4 min read
Some of my thoughts, links and stories on using persuasion, influence and negotiation in an internal corporate perspective.
A thread.
1. CEO buy in:
CISO: “CEO, do you think we should do A?”
CEO: “Yes, do it”
CISO: “Oh wait, Brexit is happening. Do you still think we should do A?”
CEO: “oh right, no don’t do that”
CISO to rest of company: “Hey everyone CEO said not to do A” (what CISO wanted the whole time)
Jan 1, 2020 • 29 tweets • 8 min read
A tweet thread of my tweet threads (we must go deeper!) 😎
What it was like working in anti-spam circa 2002 and not knowing much about regexes, database design or Linux ://twitter.com/alexpotato/status/1208948480867127296?s=21
1. So inspired by @AccidentalCISO, @0xfraq, @TinkerSec here is a story about some work I did back in the early 2000's to help fight spam.
It was late 2002. For those of you that don't remember, 9/11 had just happened and the dot com bubble had burst.
@AccidentalCISO@0xfraq@TinkerSec 2. I was fresh out of grad school(MBA) and looking to use my Comp Sci, Econ and MBA to good use.
I ended up at a small(<20 ppl) cybersecurity firm that had spun out of another firm that originally did due diligence background checks for CEOs etc.
May 21, 2018 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
Inspired by @patio11@RachelTobac@HydeNS33k@holman@sehurlburt here is a list "Quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already" aka "Things I wish someone had told me earlier"
I've often heard that #DevOps is all about #empathy and I agree.
As an operations person, the most helpful empathetic developers I ever saw were the ones that were told: "20% of your bonus depends on a rating of you from the Operations people"
