DevOps has become a “thing” that become a bit of a buzzword, but some of us have been doing development/operations (sys.admin and DBA) combined activities for years and years. All that has really changed is that there is now a name for what people like us do, whereas previously we’d get labelled in nondescript terms like, “tech guru”. I prefer the very old non-corporate nomenclature of “hacker”. A hacker doesn’t make distinctions about being a hardware or software guy (or gal) but it simply interested in how things work, to the point where we will pull stuff apart, just to see what is inside and rebuild it all again in some new and improved configuration.
This web journal is dedicated to fellow hackers and apprentice hackers who are on a deadline and might benefit from a few pointers, recipes or summaries of what is actually going on under the hood of DevOps. It is almost entirely Linux centric, though many things are generic Unix and so FreeBSD and Mac OSX (Darwin) users may find that a lot of things written about here also apply in those environments. I don’t even bother taking about Windows, because I have only ever used Microsoft technologies reluctantly and they have generally never provided the satisfaction of the Unix style of devop environment.
About Nyk Cowham
I started my technology career learning COBOL for mainframe programming and a truly hideous language popular with personal computers called BASIC and database programming using Ashton-Tate’s dBASE III Plus back in 1985. My first operating system was CP/M 2.2 on the Osborne 1, though I had played around some with the Commodore PET in math club at high school. My first home computer that I actually owned was the ill-fated Dragon 32, though I also played around with Commodore 32 and 64, as well with Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81. My finest computer ownership was when I owned a Penguin Computing 1U rack mount server and a legacy PDP-11.
My first professional gig was working for a small sign manufacturing company, running their dedicated sign template cutting computer (and fixing their typesetter machines in my spare time). Rural England in the late 1980s was not good place to work in technology and it was not until I relocated to the United States in West Virginia in the mid 90’s that I returned to technology and discovered the joys of Linux. My first Linux installation was Red Hat 5.1 (Manhattan) in 1998 and I built an apache webserver on it.
In 1998 I started working for the Defense Systems Management College at Fort Belvoir, Virginia and began advocating Linux as a replacement for their Sun SPARC servers running Solaris with commodity hardware. I reinstalled most of their Sun servers and documented and scripted the deployments. In 1999 I joined a plucky little startup consultancy as a systems engineer (basically devops) where we were running FreeBSD with Perl, Apache, MySQL, etc. It was at Forum One Communications where I helped introduce PHP development to the company (PHP3) and built a LOT of software there over 10 years.
I moved to Thailand in 2009 and have worked as a private consultant and freelance developer. I currently work for Demotix, an award winning media company that is now owned by Corbis.
DevOpstacles 