Daniel Bradley

Kubernetes is powerful. But YAML? Not so much. Here’s Harpoon in 60 seconds: No steep learning curve No YAML No security gaps Just drag, drop & deploy Visit the site & try free demo.

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MongoDB Tip of the week... TTL Indexes. I know I have missed a few weeks.. It has been crazy busy here lately. Time to Live (TTL) Indexes are a great tool for your age off strategies. Just a few things to remember. 1. They only work on time stamps and ISODates. 2. They only work, if they can complete the deletes within the 60 second intervals TTL indexes run at. I have seen both of these issues recently. For number 1, I have seen this where at a first glance it looked fine. But looking further it became clear. Here is a quick run down. Actual index. {   v: 2,   key: { timestamp: 1 },   name: 'timestamp_1',   background: true,   expireAfterSeconds: 604800  } field in documents: { ....   timestamp: Long('1596948240000'), .... } In this example a quick look you might actually miss the fact that the field is NOT a timestamp or an ICODate. It is a long, thus the TTL index was never cleanup any of this data. It only came to my attention once the collection's size got to a size that cause me to look further at the collection. Note, this collection and its indexes predate me coming on board. This is a great example when a schema could have help to avoid this issue. Again I can NOT stress enough the importance of creating a schema. I also advise against using field names of data types, reason being they can make one make assumptions that are not true. In this example the field name, probably hide the fact that the field was NOT a timestamp. For the number 2. We have a collection that is really large.. And grows at an extremely fast pace. The TTL index can NOT perform the cleanup in the 60 seconds needed. In these cases a custom built piece of code can be written to do the heavy lifting. In these examples they might work at the beginning, but as the collection grows and the load increases, you might have to re-think your strategy. So be diligent and look at your load rates, and collection sizes. Check to make sure your TTL indexes are still working.

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“We’re empowering developers to move fast and own their code in production.” Translation: We gave every dev kubectl and now we’re praying to the observability gods they don’t nuke prod. SRE and Platform work means something different everywhere you go but gets buried under the same buzzword compost. “Shift left.” “You build it, you run it.” “Platform as a product.” “Developer self-service.” “Blameless culture.” It's getting harder to tell jobs apart. What any of them actually do. Or how they’re any different. Meanwhile, candidates want the basics: Real autonomy. Meaningful project work. Backing from leadership when production hits the fan. Everything else? Just noise.

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Your CI/CD bill is not exploding because of “expensive runners,” it is bleeding out through flaky tests, over-parallelized jobs, and slow feedback loops that quietly tax every deploy This piece shows you how to redesign pipelines so you cut compute waste, shrink queues, and speed up developer flow without adding yet another approval gate or YAML religion Full breakdown in the comments. #DevOps #CICD #PlatformEngineering

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There’s a noticeable shift happening on the vendor side of the industry: more companies are trying to unify streaming, monitoring, and analytics into single platforms. Not just another “feature bundle” - but proper end-to-end architecture. What that means in hiring terms: • More demand for engineers who understand all the way across the workflow (encoding → cloud → data) • More interest in people who can talk optimisation, not just implementation • Vendors asking for candidates who can bridge tech + commercial impact If you’re a vendor building product in 2025, your next two hires probably won’t look like the last two. I’m curious - which vendors do you think are ahead of the curve here? #encoding #cloud #data #hollbridge

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Kubernetes, cloud services, functions, frameworks: the benefits are obvious...until you’ve lived with them for a year. Samir Talwar breaks down the hidden costs teams don’t account for (and why so many companies are building like they have billions of users). If you’ve ever felt trapped by your own stack, press play.

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I often ask, “Why did you design it this way?” The strongest candidates don’t jump to tools — they explain the trade-offs. Example: “We used EMR for this pipeline because Glue jobs were hitting concurrency limits, and we needed better tuning control.” That one line shows experience, ownership, and context awareness. #DataEngineering #InterviewTips

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Every engineering leader says they care about velocity. But velocity doesn’t die in the IDE. It dies in: Review queues Approval loops Dependencies across 3 other teams The fastest teams don’t code faster. They unblock faster.

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Accountability is the great equalizer of leadership. Without it, standards slip. Trust erodes. Culture drifts. I’ve led teams from 12 to 200+ people across commands spanning 100,000 square miles - and the most consistent factor in every high-performing team I’ve seen is accountability. It’s what aligns people behind one standard, regardless of rank or personality. In my latest video, I break down: 🔹 Why accountability separates good leaders from great ones 🔹 How to correct “organizational drift” before it destroys culture 🔹 When to move from verbal to written accountability 🔹 Why accountability can be both corrective and caring Watch the full breakdown here: 🎥 https://lnkd.in/eT2W6eZZ Let’s start a conversation - how do you build accountability without crushing morale? #Leadership #Accountability #OrganizationalCulture #LeadershipDevelopment #TeamBuilding #MilitaryLeadership #ElderMasterChief

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It seems like Cloudways hasn't had layoffs lately, but their level of service has recently deteriorated greatly. Normal issues used to take them 30-60 minutes to resolve. Now, open tickets stay unresolved and ignored for many hours, reports of an eventual 'resolution' are either exaggerated, meant to 'buy time', or their tech support level has dropped greatly. How effective is a provider, when it no longer provides what they marketed and what consumers signed up to receive? This seems to be a trend these days, where many 'staples of yesterday' are drowning in customer support issues, technical or operational, and it's only getting tighter. Feels, like this is the cost of low hiring for too long. Eventually, companies can no longer provide the same level of service, as attrition alone requires to hire 10-25% of most teams every year.

I see so many startups claiming they want to hire elite Software Engineers, but then demanding a coding task before even having an intro call. That’s not how you attract top talent.

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via Andre Lockhart Here is the 3-step software engineering technical vetting process for hiring engineers who write great code, with a quickness. There are clearly measurable assessment criteria for each step. Use the same tech stack they'll be working in. 1. Engineer 1: Give them a sheet of paper or a screen filled with messy code and have them talk through the refactor. 2. Engineer 2: Pair with the candidate to find/fix a bug. 3. Engineer 3: Pair with the candidate to add a feature.

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Structured Events in Rails! OMG! I've been waiting for this for ~4 years. Want to send *proper* structured events? Yeah. Me too. This is the most exciting development in observability for Rails in... ...well, forever. This opens the door to proper OpenTelemetry instrumented Rails apps... ...with a single subscriber and an intuitive interface. But it's way more than that - it allows us to instrument *business* events. Things like: * Order Processed * Customer Paid * Invoice Created I'm beyond excited about the direction the Rails team has gone in. * Decoupled the subscriber from the instrumenter * Aligned the API with the ridiculously good error reporting * Namespaces for events This will open the door to massive improvements in the observability of Rails apps. A HUGE thanks to Adrianna Chang for leading this effort and getting a huge feature into Rails that's critical for modern observability. Kudos! Comment below with your questions about how to use observability and I'll answer what I can.

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A recruiter email put Archil’s progress into perspective. This morning Shalin Patel shared an update after saturating a single Archil node over TLS with a few file system servers. The run hit 7+ GB/s. From a single client. Minutes later, a recruiter emailed me describing a specialized PB-scale system at a major AI lab, supporting around 2 GB/s per GPU. Side-by-side, it highlights something we see often: one Archil client can deliver almost 4× the single-node throughput of systems built for large training clusters. As AI workloads scale, the limit isn’t compute. It’s getting data to the compute fast enough. Archil is already removing that bottleneck. If you’re running large training pipelines, let me know! Happy to show you what speed unlocks.

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Myth: certification collectors are cloud architects. I see resumes with 12 AWS certifications. Recruiters drool over them. Hiring managers get excited. Reality: they are paper tigers. Passing a multiple-choice test doesn't mean you can handle production traffic. Real cloud-native talent isn't about memorizing service names. It’s about knowing what happens when us-east-1 goes down. It's about understanding why your microservices are a distributed monolith nightmare. It's about cost optimization so you don't bankrupt the startup in a month. Stop hiring for badges. Start hiring for battle scars. If they haven't broken production, they aren't senior. #cloudnative #aws #devops #hiringmyths #techcareers

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👨‍💻 We don’t micromanage at Optavyn. Every dev here knows they’re not “just writing code”, they’re building products that matter. Every feature we ship solves a real-world problem. Every API we build connects with a user’s workflow. Every screen we design has intent behind it. Our team works remote, but we’re aligned, focused, and committed to the end goal: Delivering results not just tasks. If you're a founder or agency who values clear ownership, clean code, and reliable delivery, we might be the team you’ve been looking for. #TeamCulture #RemoteTeam #SoftwareProduct #OptavynCulture #ExecutionMatters #TechThatWorks

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