It can be hard to know where to start when defining a strong organisational culture. One thing is for sure though, great product and tech businesses all share on thing in common: a culture that seeks to achieve product, engineering and operational excellence for its customers. Depending on what your teams do, these customers may be internal or external, but the goal is still the same.

In DevOps, the two-person rule is a widely adopted practice for ensuring accuracy and safety in critical operations. However, Software engineering teams arent the only ones applying similar techniques - what if we could take this inspiration to further improve the two-person rule? Enter Shisa Kanko, a Japanese technique that’s been used to enhance protocols in all parts of Japanese life.

Last week the world celebrated International Women’s Day and over the week many female leaders shared powerful stories. One pleasing change I've seen over the past few years is a shift from a focus on Equality to Equity for Women in the workforce. Where once quotas were a big discussion point, we’re actually talking about the real stuff – how workplace culture and sexism tends to just make it challenging for females to succeed to the same levels as men.

Following the WannaCry Ransomeware attack in 2017, Windows stopped supporting the SMB1 protocol – and along with it Windows hosts’ previous primary broadcast discovery mechanism. Since then, Linux hosts have mostly gone dark when it comes to sharing discoverable network shares with Windows network clients. However, Windows supports the Web Service Discovery (WSD) protocol. Ubuntu has added support for WSDD – and now you can easily do the same for any Linux distribution that supports Python.

Engineering teams practicing DevOps strive to improve the way they build, ship and operate their software while avoiding customer impacting outages. Parts of this problem can be solved through automation that reviews and monitors your codebase before and after release, taking action before a human operator even investigates an event. One of the hardest parts of reducing system outages completely is that software still involves human, and human involvement always brings its own set of challenges.

For the past few weeks I’ve been battling to get my Linux instances to access file shares on my Windows 10 instances over the network. Whether it was Ubuntu, Fedora, or RedHat, the recent upgrades to Windows 10 left my Windows shares inaccessible via Samba. Troubleshooting was difficult as I had nothing to go on exception really ambiguous messages via the syslog (“Failed to mount Windows share: Connection timed out”). After some trial and error it all came down to an undocumented change in how Windows 10 supports the SMB protocol.

CenturyLink’s gigabit service is pretty awesome, but their provided routers are pretty average when it comes to configurability and simply raw performance. The problem with this is that the way CenturyLink’s Gigabit service runs, you need to do a little more work to configure just any normal router to work with the service. For me, it took a little bit of digging and experimentation to figure out the right way to get a third party modem to work with CenturyLink; in my case a high performance Asus AC-3200, previously used with my Wave gigabit internet service due to it’s high performance routing backplane.

Ubiquiti WiFi gear is becoming well known as the go to brand for nerds wanting to have home WiFi that competes with commercial set ups. The Ubiquiti AC-PRO access points in particular are in the category of “next level” consumer gear, and after installing them i’ve never looked back. Being commercial gear the Ubiquiti APs do have one annoying requirement: you need to run controller software on your network to monitor and control the access points through Ubiquiti’s cloud based controller software. Luckily you can run this software on a range of hardware – and a $35 Raspberry Pi is just the ticket.

Recently I’ve been updating the configuration of a bunch of personal servers to match the 2016 PCI requirements. One of the 2016 PCI requirements requires you to disable TLS 1.0 as it is now considered insecure. One of the problems with doing this of course is the fact that WebDeploy uses SSL and by default won’t allow connections and deployments to occur with TLS disabled. Luckily the fix is rather simple.

A few years ago the Gmail team began experimenting with the concept of interactive extensions to email messages, with the release of Gmail Actions (now called Gmail Email Markup). These simple additions to your HTML email allow developers to add call-to-action type links to your emails, without customers even needing to open your email.