In his piece on the topic of pseudoscience, Prof. Steven Dutch of the University of Wisconsin says:

Theories that claim to be scientific but fly in the face of scientific consensus are often called pseudoscience

This is a strange definition of pseudoscience. It's tempting to try to tighten the definition, but as I'll …

As someone who works in IT, I hear and read a lot of comments about science. One common but unfortunate claim is that “science is not about finding truth.” While I won’t get into the underlying philosophical reasons behind this claim, I do want to at least respond to it on its face.

Etymology of the word “science”

The …

People use the term “operational excellence” in a lot of different ways. In its vaguest sense, it means continuous improvement as applied to operations. But you’re interested in what it means in the context of technology operations. And I’m here to tell you that it means automation.

Operational Excellence is one of the …

2022 Update: If you want a clear technical explanation of the OSI model, click on the cover of my book CCNP Enterprise Certification Study Guide: Implementing and Operating Cisco Enterprise Network Core Technologies for a free preview of Chapter 1 which explains each layer of the OSI model in intricate detail.

I …

After years of manually upgrading my self-hosted WordPress installation, I decided it was finally time to apply some devops principles (namely automation) to this process.

I decided to use AWS Systems Manager (aka SSM). I started out by creating the following Command Document (which happens to be in YAML format because …

If you’ve ever created a private hosted zone in Route 53, you may have noticed it always assigns the same name servers:

1 ns-1536.awsdns-00.co.uk.
2 ns-0.awsdns-00.com.
3 ns-1024.awsdns-00.org.
4 ns-512.awsdns-00.net.

The numbers don’t seem to be coincidental.

1536 is the RFC number for “Common DNS Implementation …