These are some basic tips for anyone doing hiring and being hired. Mostly common sense but I though they worth writing down as I keep seeing people doing it wrong.1 Hiring is nerve-wracking for both parties. If you’re the hiring manager and it’s not nerve-wracking for you then you’re doing it wrong. You should deeply care about every hire. If you don’t you’ll settle for less than awesome. Communication is critical.

I’m pleased to announce I’m writing another book (I’m actually writing two but this is the only one I’m going to tell you about right now). Over the last few months I’ve been playing with Docker, and have been really impressed by how cleanly it provides awesome containers. I’ve been largely using these containers as multiple stand-alone Puppet masters (make of that what you will :)) but I’ve also been looking at Docker containers as process jails and CI testing environments.

One of my recent passions has been ElasticSearch. I like searching things and I especially like being able to dump data into a custom search engine and then use its rather neat API to find the items I want. Part of this interest was sparked by writing a book about LogStash where I had to give myself a crash course in how to use ElasticSearch. I found the ElasticSearch documentation quite easy to use but finding a lot of the practical and configuration nuances like scaling or tuning required Googling for examples and blog posts.

“An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very narrow field.” - Niels Bohr. When I was a young engineer I had this really annoying habit of saying: “That’s so easy to fix. I can’t believe you couldn’t. . .” Some time later. . . “Bloody hell and damnation!” “Trickier than it looked eh?” /me fumes.

I had a random thought sitting waiting for my plane to leave (late again) in Portland. Do you put up with an inferior product if the service was awesome? What is the ratio of awesome service to inferior product that you deem acceptable? I think the answers are: “it depends” and “it varies”. I am likely to forgive a bad dish at a restaurant if the staff respond with awesome service.