Richard Presenting LMAO Helps During Outages

In 2022, I had a fantastic year of reconnecting with my passions, meeting new individuals, delivering presentations, and gaining knowledge from experienced professionals. To conclude my travels and speaking engagements for the year, I had the privilege of journeying to Florida and delivering a talk at DevOps Days Tampa. Having attended DevOps conferences for many years, I was thrilled to create an engaging presentation that encouraged collaboration and prompted attendees to reflect on critical considerations when preparing for on-call duties.

A few days ago the opportunity to joined a Blacks United In Leading Tech speakers panel event to discuss “The truth about Black Consultants”. This was my first event with this group, it was a great conversation we talked about our personal journeys in the industry of consulting while sharing valuable insights and advice around some key areas of interest:

• Transferable skills for various positions in consulting.
• How to set the right expectations and key behaviors.
• How to find a job as a Black Consultant.
• Best advice on how to break into this industry.

Blacks united in leading tech international is a great orginzation.Through community-focused activities, events and programs, BUILT International is part of the united movement, bringing equality in tech. You can find out more about them on their website builtinternational.org.

I had the opportunity to attend another DevOps Days Chicago which is a regional conference focused on software development, IT infrastructure operations, and the intersection between them called DevOps. This was the fourth DevOps days I have attended, third in person, and first as a speaker. Speaking of which it’s good to be able to get back to a conference in person. I’m an extrovert so I love meeting new people and don’t get that really from virtual conferences. You’ll learn a lot, but I missed that one part when I was a Developer Advocate at Coyote are used to attend a lot of conferences and user group meetings, and 2020 kind of put a stop to that in many ways. It was great to see people in person. People I hadn’t seen in a long time like from a company I left 2 years ago or from local user groups and find out what they’re up to now and how their life has changed over the last few years. It was great meeting new and future business partners and hearing from the vendors about what makes their products different than others. Heck even one TACO product vendors gave away 100 bucks cash for looking at and testing their product in a demo environment.

Recently I took some time to revisit Azure Cache for Redis I got first introduced to the service in 2018 and a lot has changed since then. I won’t go into detail about Redis and what it is or What is caching. But instead, I want to share my thoughts on using it on the Azure platform.

A particular use benefit of using Azure Cache for Redis instead of the self-hosting version for data cache needs is it will allow a business to bring the frequently called data to the cloud so that the data can be called faster with higher availability. This is perfect for situations where you have a frequently queried data source stored within a private network with high latency and an even higher constraint on memory usage from on-prem servers.

Recap

This is a continuation of my 2020 network overhaul. You can read the details about how this project started at this link. I ended the updates to my home network in 2020 in a good place and by that I mean everything was running smoothly with the full network being managed by software. There were no issues but lot’s of opportunities for improvement. So that left me thinking my 2021 improvements would be focused on reducing dependencies on 3rd party cloud services such as Ring and Google Nest cameras. Since everything was working just fine I was in no hurry to buy devices that were being sold with a markup. So I slowly began to acquire devices toward the end goal as devices went GA and deals popped up at Microcenter and eBay since this would be the most expensive part of the network.

Backstory

For my website, security has always been a second-class citizen I’ve never treated it fairly outside of the basic practices of an SSL certificate and patching of the host and any plugins I might be using. I had the opportunity to join Scott Hanselman for a small group session hosted by my company and one of the things he talked about was providing server-side security and sound of mind to users. He asked the audience for someone’s website address to show security vulnerabilities so I was quick to volunteer mine I assume my website was ok I knew that I was running a Hugo static hosted website on Netlify so I wasn’t truly concerned. He pulled up the website securityheaders.com and scanned gogorichie.com needless to say I was surprised my site ranked in as a D on a grading scale of A+ to R.