While writing about the helpful analysis described in Agile Conversations, I mentioned that I had some concerns with the book. While the analysis method draws upon solid scientific studies and I have personally found the conversation types useful in identifying and engaging in the different interactions that I have with my co-workers, the foundation upon which the authors built bothered me. The fundamental reason that the authors give for why conversations are effective at changing culture is as follows:

I was speaking with some colleagues the other day about some low trust interactions that I had recently observed. Based on my description of my observations, one colleague commented that the interactions appeared to arise from a negative feedback loop that promoted a low trust environment between senior leadership, managers, and employees. To break that feedback loop, he recommended having the different groups take a Speed of Trust course. Having gone through a course myself, I agreed that it would encourage trust-building behavior, yet I was concerned that convincing even one group to take the course would be a monumental task. Another colleague acknowledged my concern and the difficulty with saying “Hey, I noticed you’re in a low trust environment, would you like to take this trust course?”

During the COVID-19 stay-at-home order, I’ve been blessed to be able to work from home. However, I faced what many people suffered when switching from working in the office to working at home: a poor VPN connection. In my case, my connection would hiccup every 5 minutes.

This problem had shown up before we were forced to stay-at-home and I had worked on it with an excellent network administrator at my client. When tethered to my phone or using the office guest network, the VPN was rock-solid. It seemed to only fail on my home internet connection. This knowledge - combined with the stay-at-home order - gave me an excellent excuse to tinker on my home network.

Recently, a friend reached out to me to help him debug a 404 error that didn’t make any sense in his Kubernetes cluster.

He had a rather simple setup:

• a pod for his application
• a nginx ingress used as a load balancer
• a nginx ingress that pointed to the application pod
• cert-manager for automatically generating certificates from Let's Encrypt

After talking through his setup, I put together the following diagram:

When I posted last, I noticed that the nice permalink took me to a 404 error page rather than my intended blog post. So I temporarily disabled the nice permalink until I could debug the problem.

After digging into it, it turned out that I was missing this stanza from my Apache configuration:

<Directory /var/www/wordpress/>
    AllowOverride All
</Directory>

This meant that Apache was ignoring the .htaccess file that WordPress generated for permalinks.

Much has happened since I last posted something: a move, a new job, kids, and more! Reflecting on my motivations for writing, I realize that I was attempting to write at length on topics that I knew next to nothing about. With this in mind I’ve thrown out all my drafts and plan to keep my posts short and simple.

Reflecting on recent events: The crisis in the Catholic Church, the increasingly extreme divisive language in politics, and the spiritual and moral poverty in society, I’ve realized that so much of what we argue about is peanuts in comparison to God’s plan. I’m hoping that these blog posts are a kind of almsgiving.

In my last post, I established the difficulty of being personally responsible without accountability to something or someone, and hinted that perhaps the tribe should be that someone.

Assuming that my hint was true, when a person would act, he would be responsible to the tribe he lives in. This would lead to the building of trust between the members and potentially to benefits for the entire group that would be impossible for a single person to realize by himself. It would appear that within such a community, a person would truly be able to realize his full potential.

With the arrival of 2016, I’ve made a resolution to write 500 words once a week with some friends.

Sigh.

Now that that is off my chest, let us proceed with the first installment.

Recently, I was wondering about radical individualism and personal responsibility. My train of thought was started by an email thread from a group of coworkers. In the brief discussion, amid the glittering generalities, appeals to prestige, jargon and so forth, and with an overarching sense of radical individualism and a grumbling against any form of perceived oppression by a governing power, the same old line was trotted out: “People need to break from the tribe, embrace their personal agency, take responsibility for their actions, and, by chaining the darkness within, achieve self-actualization!”

I’m fighting passion project paralysis.

I want to work on an open source project, but I can’t seem to find the energy to get over that initial inertia of choosing a project, setting up the environment, etc.

Whenever this happens, I start worrying: what happened to the passion that I used to have? Why do I not have a project that I just want to hack on? Am I just complacent with the software I have, since it pretty much accomplishes what I want it to do?