Scrum, sprints, and outcomes · Major Hayden
Although Scrum is a popular agile methodology, it often becomes a theater of activity that distracts teams from what customers actually need. 📅| Major Hayden
A social nerd writing about everything 🤓| Major Hayden
Efficiently communicate a problem and your recommendation in record time with an SBAR. 📝| Major Hayden
Developing software with a critcal date comes with its own set of challenges.| Major Hayden
Although Scrum is a popular agile methodology, it often becomes a theater of activity that distracts teams from what customers actually need. 📅| Major Hayden
Yes, I do write code with help from an LLM, but I wouldn’t call it vibe coding. Let’s dig into how (and why) I do it. 🤖| Major Hayden
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) is helpful for AI workflows, but it certainly is not easy.| Major Hayden
A recent switch back to i3 (from sway) left me wondering how to examine just the Xorg logs sent to journald.| Major Hayden
I replaced my old Toyota 4Runner with a new one so I could snag the last run of the 5th generation. It’s a tough, reliable vehicle with just enough space for my family and our pets. However, this new one came with the same problem as my old one. All of the bolts that hold in the front skid plate were mostly stripped. Getting them out was difficult and I knew getting them back in would be worse. I’ll cover how to fix it in this post. If you’re in a hurry, scroll past the next section! Ot...| Major Hayden
Bienvenidos!1 I’ve been learning Spanish for just over a year and I often type messages in either Spanish or English (my native language) with coworkers and friends. Just like most people, I make spelling mistakes in both languages. 🙃 Firefox offers a feature for multi-language spell checking and translations but it can be a bit challenging to set up. This post explains how to load languages into Firefox and use them for spell checking. Installing languages # Take a trip over to [Diction...| Major Hayden
Ask anyone about the toughest part of their workday and it usually comes down to one thing: meetings. There are plenty of reasons: The meeting could have been an email Nobody notices when I attend the meeting, but they notice when I don’t The meeting is recurring whether there’s something important to talk about or not There’s no time for questions after everyone presents in a meeting Someone dominates the conversation This was a central problem in my “Five tips for a thriving technol...| Major Hayden
Author’s note: This post is all about my personal thoughts on artificial intelligence (AI) and they don’t represent the views of any employer or group. --- You can’t escape the clutches of AI lately. It’s in my smartphone nestled next to my text messages. It’s in my work chats. It’s reading my Spanish in Duolingo. It’s in my photo albums retouching my images. Sometimes we know that there’s AI involved in something and sometimes we don’t. However, it seems like so many are in...| Major Hayden
I recently built a new PC for my birthday and I splurged a bit with a new AMD Radeon 7900 XTX GPU. Although I’m not a heavy gamer, I’m working with LLMs more often and I’m interested to do some of this work at home. btop is my go-to tracker for all kinds of data about my system, including CPU usage, memory usage, disk I/O, and network throughput. It’s a great way to track down bottlenecks and find out why your CPU fan is spinning at max speed. 😜 Screenshot of btop running on my sys...| Major Hayden
I’m splitting time between two roles at work now and one of the roles has a heavy focus on LLMs. Much like many of you, I’ve given ChatGPT a try with questions from time to time. I’ve also used GitHub Copilot within Visual Studio Code. They’re all great, but I was really hoping to run something locally on my machine at home. Then I stumbled upon a great post on All Things Open titled “Build a local AI co-pilot using IBM Granite Code, Ollama, and Continue” that started me down a pa...| Major Hayden
Plex has been a mainstay for serving up media at home but it seems to have changed lately towards a more and more commercial offering. A friend recommended Jellyfin and I deployed it on my Synology NAS in a Docker container. I did a few quick tests in a web browser and everything looked good. But then my Jellyfin android app told me: Playback failed due to a fatal player error Everything looked fine in the browser, so it was time to dig in. Checking the logs # I opened up an ssh connection on...| Major Hayden
Linux networking and firewalls give us plenty of options for redirecting traffic from one port to another. We can allow people outside our home to reach a web server we run in our internal network. That’s called destination NAT, ot DNAT. You can also redirect traffic to different ports on the same host. For example, if you have a daemon listening on port 3000, but you want people to reach that service on port 80, you can redirect traffic from 80 to 3000 on the same host (without network add...| Major Hayden
We’ve all been in that situation where we see a device in Linux and wonder which physical device it corresponds to. I remember when I built my first NAS and received an alert that a drive had failed. It took me a while to figure out which physical drive actually needed to be replaced. This happens with network devices, too, and I wrote a post about systemd’s predictable network device names back in 2015. Cloud instances often make it even more confusing because storage devices are fully v...| Major Hayden
Scroll through the list of Wayland posts posts on the blog and you’ll see that I’ve solved plenty of weird problems with Wayland and the Sway compositor. Most are pretty easy to fix but some are a bit trickier. Java applications are notoriously unpredictable and Wayland takes unpredictability to the next level. One particular application on my desktop always seems to start with massive cursors. This post is about how I fixed and then discovered something interesting along the way. Fixing ...| Major Hayden
We’re all familiar with the trusty old dhclient on our Linux systems, but it went end-of-life in 2022: NOTE: This software is now End-Of-Life. 4.4.3 is the final release planned. We will continue to keep the public issue tracker and user mailing list open. You should read this file carefully before trying to install or use the ISC DHCP Distribution. Most Linux distributions use dhclient along with cloud-init for the initial dhcp request during the first part of cloud-init’s work. I set of...| Major Hayden
The 2024 Texas Linux Festival just ended last weekend and it was a fun event as always. It’s one my favorite events to attend because it’s really casual. You have plenty of opportunities to see old friends, meet new people, and learn a few things along the way. I was fortunate enough to have two talks accepted for this year’s event. One was focused on containers while the other was a (very belated) addition to my impostor syndrome talk from 2015. This was also my first time building sli...| Major Hayden
Static blogs come with tons of advantages. They’re cheap to serve. You store all your changes in git. People with spotty internet connections can clone your blog and run it locally. However, one of the challenges that I’ve run into over the years is around analytics. I could quickly add Google Analytics to the site and call it a day, but is that a good idea? Many browsers have ad blocking these days and the analytics wouldn’t even run. For those that don’t have an ad blocker, do I wan...| Major Hayden
Much of my work at Red Hat revolves around the RHEL experience in public clouds. I thrive on input from customers, partners, and coworkers about how they consume public clouds and why they made decisions to deploy there. Throughout this process, I run into some wild misconceptions about public clouds and what makes them useful. One that I hear most often is: Businesses are moving to the cloud to reduce cost and improve efficiency. It’s mainly just a purchasing exercise. This couldn’t be f...| Major Hayden
--- It’s quite clear that I’ve been on a CoreOS blogging streak lately. I keep getting asked by people inside and outside my company about what makes CoreOS special and why I’ve switched over so many workloads to it. The answer is pretty basic. It makes my life easier. I’m a Dad. I’m on the PTC (Parent Teacher Club) at one of my children’s schools. I volunteer as an IT person for a non-profit. I write software. I have other time consuming hobbies, such as ham radio, reading, and b...| Major Hayden
Caddy offers a great web and proxy server experience with minimal configuration and automated TLS certificates. Learn how to connect Caddy to Porkbun to get TLS certificates by managing your DNS records for you automatically. 🐷| Major Hayden
Now that AMD’s Zen 4 CPUs landed in lots of laptops, I picked up a ThinkPad Z13 G2 with an AMD Ryzen CPU. Did I put Linux on it? Of course I did. 🐧| Major Hayden
Dark mode lovers rejoice! It’s possible to get (most) applications to show up in dark mode in the Sway window manager. 😎| Major Hayden
Diverse teams lead to great outcomes, but how we measure diversity remains a challenge. Enforcing it is even more challenging. 🌎| major.io
October brings us the Halloween holiday here in the US and I set off on an adventure into some spooky and unsettling books. 👻| major.io
My issues with open source mailing lists aren’t with the technology, but with unorganized pattern of the discourse itself. 🖇️| Major Hayden
Although my first attempt at self-hosting Mastodon was a failure, I went back for a second attempt with docker-compose. 🧗♂️| Major Hayden
Avoid cloud provider modifications and deploy a genuine release version of Fedora 37 on Hetzner Cloud. ⛅| Major Hayden
