DevOps seems to be sweeping through IT departments these years and for most developers it seems to be sen as a way of getting those pesky gatekeepers from Operations away and ship code whenever any developers feels like it. The problem is however, that in the eagerness to be a modern DevOps operation, the focus is often solely on the benefits of faster releases (on the short term) the “DevOps” provide over “Dev to Ops”, and many developers do seem to forget the virtues Operations (should) bring to the party.

No, your servers should (probably) not have a facebook profile, nor should your servicebus have a twitter profile, but as the work tools change and evolve, you should probably consider updating the stream of status mails to more modern “social media” used at work. When you’re in DevOps you probably get a steady stream of emails from various systems checking in. It may be alert emails, health checks or backup completed emails.

Remember the good old days, when IT got a new server. It was a special event - and naturally the naming game. Finding that special name for the server, which neatly fitted into the naming scheme adopted (be it Indian cities, Nordic mythology or cartoon characters). This ought to be then, but the ceremony still happens regularly in many IT departments, where servers are treated with the same affection as with pets - and with all the bad side effects it may bring along.

At its simplest feature toggle is a small if-statement, which may be toggled without deploying code, and used to enable features (new or changed functionality) in your software. In an agile setup most developers love having feature toggles available, as they often allow for a continuous delivery setup with very little friction and obstacles. While this is true, it often seems developers forget to think of feature toggles as ephemeral, and doesn’t realize what a terrible mess, this can cause - given they don’t remove the toggles once the feature is launched and part of the product.

Building audiobooks on (Debian) Linux in the m4b format is actually possible and doesn’t have to be a pain. I’ve found numerous recipes with shell instructions, but having a nice simple app to handle the building of the books seems much easier. Most of the apps available for Linux seemed to be in a pre-alpha state, but after a few experiments I’ve settled on m4baker, which - while a bit rough - actually seems to do the job just fine.