Picture a grand hall, lit warmly by flickering torches, filled with laughter, songs, and the clinking of goblets brimming with golden liquid. This enchanting beverage, known as mead, has captivated humans for millennia. Crafted simply from fermented honey, water, and yeast, its humble origins belie its profound influence throughout human history. Let’s journey through the captivating story of how mead became an indispensable part of societies around the globe.

At first glance, mead-making and DevOps might seem worlds apart. One is a centuries-old craft steeped in tradition, while the other is a modern approach to software development and delivery. But beneath the surface, they share a surprising number of parallels. Both require patience, experimentation, and a commitment to continuous improvement to achieve great results. Let us explore how the principles of mead-making can provide valuable lessons for DevOps professionals looking to refine their workflows and drive better outcomes.

A Question of Bubbles: The Art of Carbonating Mead Picture this: a golden glass of mead, effervescent bubbles rising like tiny celebratory sparks, transforming a simple sip into a crisp, refreshing delight. Now contrast that with the smooth, velvety flow of a still mead—complex, contemplative, meant for slow appreciation. The choice between sparkling and still mead is not just a technical decision but an artistic one, influencing aroma, mouthfeel, and the overall drinking experience.

In today’s rapidly evolving technological environment, organizations face a crucial decision: where to host their applications and infrastructure. The choices typically come down to cloud, on-premises, or a hybrid setup. Each option carries its own set of advantages and challenges, and when combined with DevOps practices, the potential for agile and efficient software delivery skyrockets. In this post, we’ll explore the intricacies of these environments, discuss how DevOps benefits from each, and highlight best practices for leveraging them effectively.

Yeast is the quiet architect of fermentation, the invisible force that transforms honey and water into something greater—mead, the drink of legends. It’s easy to focus on honey selection, water chemistry, and aging techniques, but at the heart of it all is yeast, the single most influential ingredient after honey itself. Choosing the right yeast strain is more than just a technical decision; it’s an artistic one. It defines the mead’s alcohol level, mouthfeel, and flavor complexity.

When I first stumbled across Ansible, it felt like I’d found a secret weapon for simplifying IT automation. Suddenly, repetitive and time-consuming tasks that used to weigh me down could be handled by clearly defined playbooks and a few well-structured commands. Before I knew it, I was orchestrating servers and deploying complex applications with minimal fuss. In this post, I want to walk you through Ansible’s backstory, weigh its pros and cons, and share some real-life examples so you can see what the fuss is all about.

Looking for a job in 2025 is a masterclass in patience, persistence, and, frankly, some degree of masochism. Gone are the days when a well-crafted resume and a firm handshake could land you an interview. Today, the process is riddled with roadblocks, automated gatekeepers, and an ever-increasing sense of frustration that makes even the most seasoned professionals question their worth. I’ve been in the tech industry for over 20 years.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of software development, DevOps has emerged as a pivotal methodology that bridges the gap between development and operations teams. Central to this paradigm are automation tools that streamline processes, enhance collaboration, and ensure reliable deployments. This article delves into some of the most prominent DevOps tools—Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Terraform (and its fork OpenTofu), Pulumi, CloudFormation, and others—exploring their histories, uses, comparisons, pros and cons, and their significance in modern DevOps and Platform Engineering.

Fermentation is a slow and sometimes unpredictable process. Whether you’re making mead, beer, cider, or any other fermented beverage, keeping track of gravity changes is crucial for knowing when fermentation is slowing down, when it’s done, and how your yeast is performing. Enter the Tilt Hydrometer—a wireless, floating digital hydrometer that makes monitoring fermentation easy, precise, and, most importantly, hands-free. Why Use a Tilt Hydrometer? The Tilt Hydrometer is a game-changer for homebrewers, especially those who are tired of pulling samples with a thief, checking gravity with a hydrometer or refractometer, and worrying about contamination every time they open their fermenter.

A Tale of Two Teams Once upon a time in the world of software development, two groups stood on opposite sides of a deep divide: developers and operations teams. Developers, eager to push out new features and improve user experiences, constantly sought faster deployments. Meanwhile, operations teams, responsible for system reliability, viewed rapid changes with suspicion, fearing instability and outages. What resulted was a cycle of frustration. Developers wrote code and threw it over the proverbial wall to operations, who then struggled to deploy it smoothly.