Who’s afraid of angry feminists? Well me sometimes. Angry feminists present a challenge to the assumptions of privilege that are so easy for me to fall into. It is never a comfortable place to be when someone skewers your assumptions and reminds me that in almost every way my privilege shapes how I experience the world. That my privilege creates a bubble from which it is all too easy to see a universality rather than a cultural and moral relativity.

Since Docker was announced there have been a lot of discussions about where Docker fits with configuration management tools like Puppet and Chef. I spent a bit of time this week thinking about scenarios, images, management tooling and talking to people about how they use Docker, either with or without configuration management tools. I didn’t learn any startling insights but I did decide that, like most aspects of the domain, there is a lot of room for a lot of tools.

One of the things that has always irritated me about technical books is that they date. Often really, really quickly. Add in a fast moving project, like say Puppet, and that can become really annoying. This is especially true of dead tree books where errata might only be updated if the publisher prints a new edition (and grumble sometimes not even then). As some of you may have noticed The LogStash Book has gone through multiple versions.

I’m in the midst of writing a book about Docker (which I am sure you’re damn sick of hearing about now :) ). Part of the process is finding some folks to do the technical review of the book. The technical reviewers job is crucial to ensuring the quality of the technical content. I’ve written a post about what a good technical reviewer does here. If you’re interested in doing this then the bad news is that it’s unpaid but the good news is that you get a full credit in the fronts matter of the book including a bio and a link to your website/LinkedIn profile etc.

I was recently asked to talk through how to make change in heavily corporate, ITIL and/or regulated environments. I threw together some rough thoughts that I figure are worth repeating here. What I tell people when they are facing down the internal nay-sayers and the change resistant is: “The data and the customer trumps everything.” Despite impressions there is nothing in ITIL that says “change should be slow.” Or cumbersome. ITIL is about providing audit, insight and risk management in your IT services/operations.