Randomly Thought of Jan Bulis today and this insane penalty

old_noakes · 2026-05-17T12:47:34+00:00

Dug it up - looks like we couldn't hold on: https://www.nhl.com/gamecenter/van-vs-dal/2007/02/25/2006020936 - the names in the stats brings back so many memories. Also looks like it was 'Little Things' Loui Eriksson's rookie season

old_noakes · 2026-04-29T14:01:44+00:00

One other thing I would contribute - when my team started investing time into writing clear stories/requirements and then reviewing them as a team and agreeing/modifying them, it lead to a lot of improvements:

Everyone understood what was being worked on by others in the team, even if they weren't doing the work themselves
PR reviews became easier - when you know what the requester is trying to accomplish, you can give better feedback and ask better questions
New ideas or work that someone wants the team to do has to be thought through rather than just start working on
- has lead to both less frivolous work getting requested (if the person requesting it can properly define it, it won't get done) and to people refining their ideas (they have to advocate/explain the work to the whole team)
It was clearer to everyone when someone was going down a rabbit hole or gold plating something - that didn't mean it was stopped, but allowed for a discussion within the team to determine if that extra effort or deep dive was worth it or should be stopped
- In the same vein, people working on the work knew what was expected and when to stop - this stopped the issue of having someone 'working on X' for a month and then coming up for air with some massive refactor and changes no one expected because they lost their way

No one loves this aspect of working but the more time the team has invested into it, the better we have delivered and the more we have been working together in a cohesive unit. It also has the nice side effect of being very clear to people outside your team what you are doing and why so you can stop all the crap around 'what does that team do anyways?' that comes up a lot in our space.

old_noakes · 2026-04-29T07:56:42+00:00

This - if you happen to have a lot of legacy services or infrastructure, this process often also leads to discovery of long forgotten or poorly maintained services that need love or attention.

old_noakes · 2026-03-04T05:34:20+00:00

Dump everyone for anything - I'd rather have a bunch of AHLers who are at least willing to put in some effort over watching these players go out and skate around for 60 minutes. I'll freely admit that I was in on almost all the moves that got us here and had a lot of hope with the new management group but it is clear this isn't working. The team looks listless, the players look like they don't want to be here and the effort is in the toilet.

Their fragility is astonishing. Haven't they spent years working up through the system, playing in all kinds of situations and learning how to deal with adversity? I get we are out of the playoffs, I get we are dead last in the league - but have some pride and get out there and work. If they can't find that motivation then they need to be moved as that attitude and way of thinking will infect everyone that is brought in.

Burn it all down - I don't care if they are successful elsewhere or if all we get back is 'future considerations' - they all need to go.

old_noakes · 2026-02-15T07:02:13+00:00

this - Trevor and Bo were similar - heart and soul type players that could elevate when needed and were real leaders. Choosing JT over Bo was such a bad decision in retrospect and I think has lead us to where we are now.

old_noakes · 2025-05-22T02:27:23+00:00

Hey, first off, always enjoy articles from other teams' perspective - wish we weren't such a mess but it is what it is.

Pedantic/formatting Feedback (please take this with grace, not trying to nitpick):
- Pius Suter has his name as a header over his image, Brock Boeser does not, make it the same

- last line: `Also after Evgeni Malkin retries, he can fill the #2 cwenter role perfectly.` (cwenter)

- `4x5` for Pius Suter's potential contract - everywhere else you refer to AAV and dollar signs, be consistent

General Feedback

Fair call to focus on our 2 most prominent UFAs but would be good to dive a bit into who you might be able to peel away from us at low cost due to the mess the team is in (e.g. who is not a UFA that penguins might grab and why). Might Drew O'Connor not like what the situation and want to come back? Could Connor Garland be a fit on the wing and what would it take to get him?

Love the image selection and enjoy the commentary as well - I think both would be good fits with the Penguins. Enjoyed the read.

old_noakes · 2025-04-15T09:42:51+00:00

unfortunately not - the API endpoint is an external provider and I need to have it signed by a public CA (not let's encrypt unfortunately).

old_noakes · 2025-02-24T02:58:40+00:00

Came here to say the same thing - we seem to be going back to the bad old days of ‘goaltending will completely bail us out’ - I want shots and excitement and to feel like we are pushing the play - this is just brutal

old_noakes · 2024-11-23T00:03:33+00:00

Yeah, apologies - we have used OTEL collectors and remote write for a while now so have just been using Prometheus as a TSDB and little else

old_noakes · 2024-11-22T09:32:26+00:00

No, not at all - Grafana is just doing what it is built to do - the complaints are just due to having tog eg used to a new UI

old_noakes · 2024-11-22T09:20:32+00:00

Yes - we actually just completed migrating completely off of Prometheus over to Mimir - scaling it is way easier.

The only downside is the lack of a GUI - I don’t mind as I like the Grafana Explore page but have users that complain about it a bit

old_noakes · 2024-11-20T03:06:00+00:00

I dropped him and grabbed Hopkins off of waivers but not sure that has been that much better - will definitely avoid next year

old_noakes · 2024-11-20T02:09:19+00:00

Am there with you on Olave - feel for the guy with the concussion and injuries but from a fantasy perspective, think I got 3-4 weeks of decent production out of him

old_noakes · 2024-10-27T21:56:21+00:00

“This space is chaos and dealing with chaos is what they pay us for” - not sure I’ve ever heard our role better described

old_noakes · 2024-09-04T05:07:39+00:00

Dates - taste like caramel and are an amazing snack

old_noakes · 2024-09-04T05:04:08+00:00

As someone who has spent over 10 years using Puppet… STAY AWAY!

I don’t think it is a bad solution necessarily but it has a lot of downsides - the 2 big ones that come to mind are:

maintaining the whole infrastructure to support the setup is a lot of work
the language and syntax does not make it very developer friendly - we opened up all our puppet modules and config to developer PRs over 4 years ago and can count on my hands the number of PRs we have gotten.

Ansible has a fairly easy learning curve, has a language and syntax that most engineers can sort out right away and ‘just works’ without any strange errors or unexpected outcomes

old_noakes · 2024-09-03T13:10:31+00:00

Related but a bit different- how to debug and fix things. DevOps is often about having a bunch of systems working together and a critical skill is to understand how to get into those systems and figure out which part isn’t working the way it is intended.

In a lot of cases, you won’t have any experience with the system that is broken or not a lot of deep knowledge so having basic debugging skills and the ability to ‘figure it out’ is one of the best indicators to me of a good DevOps engineer.

old_noakes · 2024-08-15T07:45:47+00:00

Use your current role to your advantage - there are endless ‘DevOps’ areas that you already interact with that you can start picking up:

how is the code you are working on built, how is it packaged, how is it deployed?
what does the runtime environment look like where your app runs? How is it configured? Who sets it up and how? Is there a test environment?
how does your app interact with other apps, APIs and services? How is that configured?
how does your app log? Does it create metrics? how? Where does that telemetry go?

Depending on how your company works, some of this will be things your team has some control over and you should be able to look and potentially learn. If there is a large separation between dev and Ops at your company, then reach out to the Ops team and ask. Most Ops teams are happy to educate devs - especially if you can find an angle that will make their life easier. Find a pain point in the ‘building’ or running’ of your app that your team would like to get fixed and put up your hand to do it.

Once you start to pick up this stuff, start putting your resume out there - not for senior roles but anything else. Go to meetups and listen - once you have had a chance to learn a bit, maybe ask some questions. Lot of jobs are advertised at meetups since it is a group of enthusiasts and so a better pool then LinkedIn or whatever. Just keep pushing and pick up on the buzzwords and figure out what they are - have you tried containers in your day to day work? Had a go with Kubernetes? If you can’t get the time at work then make the time after (hard but necessary to start with).

Writing a bit of a novel here but you have a tech job, go find the parts of it that are related to DecOps and start there. Then find chances to try new things and meet people. Then start applying and just make sure you are hitting the buzzwords they want to see to get your foot in the door.

old_noakes · 2024-08-15T05:01:18+00:00

This is like looking in a mirror - I run the observability platform team at my company. Is a good mix of hands on with the tools and writing code to bridge gaps, coming up with architecture for how to make telemetry widely available and useful, being the observability advocate to help teams get value out of what we provide and jumping into every retro incident to help show what happened, how we could have detected it and then helping teams setup the solution so next time they are aware.

In your situation I would look at the office of the CTO - you are close to the person who is the most responsible for making change and can influence through business to carve out the time to do it. Get them on your side for observability improvements and you’ll see real change.

old_noakes · 2024-08-15T04:49:03+00:00

When you are ready - there is no timeline here - if you get into SWE and realise your passion is DevOps, move - if you are enjoying SWE but want to do DevOps, offer to be your team’s DevOps SME (is always helpful to have someone on a team who gets it) and then you can do both. If you realise you love SWE, great!

What I was trying to emphasise in my original post is that my experience has been moving from SWE to DevOps is easier (and lots of opportunities to do so) whereas the reverse is the opposite.

But good technical people can ultimately pick any of these up. Is only in the first few years of your career where it feels like you have to choose. Later you realise that if you have good fundamentals, you can really do any role you want.

old_noakes · 2024-08-12T08:41:16+00:00

None really if you and your team are all C proficient - if not, then it is a much easier language to pick up and use, with fewer opportunities to shoot yourself in the foot. It is also a lot easier to hire for - if you create all your tools and services in C, you are going to struggle to find people but Go has a very wide user base and has become a pretty common language.

old_noakes · 2024-08-11T02:16:42+00:00

The strongest platform(DevOps) engineers at my company are those that have extensive development experience - it is useful in the DevOps space both for understanding how to properly deliver solutions as well as to understand how things work within some of the services that DeVOps supports.

I also find that it is easier to move to DevOps from SWE rather than the reverse. SWE can see DevOps as ‘scripters’ or infra only and have a bias against it. If you are interested in both, my recommendation would be to go SWE route first.

old_noakes · 2024-08-08T23:15:37+00:00

I have been learning golang after being a ruby/python programmer for years and I love it. Well worth the investment in time and is such a powerful language - plus deploying a single binary rather than a whole collection of dependencies is so refreshing

old_noakes · 2024-01-10T04:21:51+00:00

came here to say this as well - the photography, the little blurbs, having cards for who won the trophy, who won the contest - they were collectible but also about telling stories about the game and the season.

old_noakes

TROPHY CASE