Managing a high-growth company is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. One big reason is that I only received problems that no one else could figure out. Some were organizational problems that should naturally route to the CEO, but a lot were functional issues that I was no more capable of solving than anyone else.
I eventually discerned a repeated pattern in solving these problems. At first I would just get a few issues. I’d muddle through - do a bit of research, ask for help, and sort things out. As we grew, more and more of my time would be spent on this one kind of problem. I’d become better and better at handling it, and just about the time I’d start feeling like I knew what I was doing, I’d realize, “Oh: There are people out there who specialize in this”. I could just hire someone to do it full time, and they’d be better at it than I ever would. Duh.
I’d then spend three months, or six, or twelve, hiring for the role, and bam, suddenly my time is freed up and I’ve got an actual expert in charge. Well, kind of. At this point I’m a self-taught semi-expert who does not buy into the orthodoxy of the role, and we’ve got a year of my weird solutions, so there’s a lot of friction as we sort out just how to add this new skill set to a growing org. But the point is, my time spent on this problem drops precipitously, and I no longer have much opportunity to put my new-found skills into practice.
Usually just in time for something new to come into focus.
This pattern - gain just enough expertise to hire someone - played out again and again, for me and for other founders I’ve talked to.
In some ways it’s thrilling. You get experience with all of the key areas at the company, and you’re always learning something new.
In other ways, though, it is soul-crushing. Over the eight years I managed Puppet while in fast hiring mode, I rarely got to spend time doing anything I was good at. Humans have a psychological need to feel competent, to feel like they are in control and know what’s going on. I don’t need this all the time, but please, just a little? Sometimes? Nope. Pretty much the second I started to feel like I understood something, I had to hire for it, and my problem changed from doing to managing.
After years of this, I knew just enough about everything to suck at it, but not enough to actually be useful to anyone.
Only as my tenure as CEO came to a close did I begin to see what I uniquely added to the organization. I began being comfortable not delegating certain problems, and felt justified in spending hours on something as an individual contributor, rather than seeking leverage in everything I did.
Only once this happened did I start to feel comfortable as a CEO. I wasn’t just routing problems, I was actually solving some of them. I was not spending 100% of my time in areas I was incompetent; just most of it.
I know the advice as well as you: Great leaders delegate, they empower. If you’re doing the work yourself, you’re not a real leader.
Bullshit.
Yes, building and running a team absolutely requires that you empower the team. But that doesn’t mean you don’t get to do anything yourself, that you hand everything off and have nothing left.
Just like everyone else, you, too, need a reason to show up, to stay engaged. You have to hold on to your own why.
If you don’t remember why you, personally, are in the job, then you’ll look up in a few years and realize it’s not there any more. You’ve moved too far from what gets you up in the morning, and suddenly you can’t do it. Or worse, the company has developed but you haven’t. You’re no better at the thing you want to master than you were when you started, because you haven’t been spending time on the problems you care most about.
Some of this is that you need a place of safety. I am a highly fireable person, and raising venture capital made for downright tenuous tenure. The less confident I was about my own strengths, my own value, the less safe I felt. And humans need to feel safe to do great work.
More than that, though, I needed a platform for learning. I was pursuing mastery, but of what, exactly? Of not mastering things?
I know other leaders really are master delegators, hirers, organizers, etc. But that was never going to be me.
I had to peel things back, really understand why I was there, what I cared about, what I wanted to be the best in the world at. And, really, what I was good enough at that I ended up in this place, running this company. Then, as the problems rolled by, I could be sure to push that forward just a little bit, even if my focus was on the organization’s needs, not my own.
The times I lost this sense of why I was there and what I was getting better at were some of my most depressing days. But the days where I could connect what I felt good at, what I spent my time on, and what the company needed from me were the best days.
I don’t think that’s any different for me, or for other founders, than it is for anyone else.
But all the discussions of leadership I hear leave this bit out: You’re a human, too. You have to provide the why for the whole organization, but every individual deserves to be able to translate that into what they do every day. Even you.
My experience growing and fundraising for Puppet was full of inspirational-sounding phrases that cut like a knife. Aggressive goals got praise for wanting to “build a real product” and “really scale this thing.” These are some of my favorites. And when I say “favorites,” what I mean is, I hate them. Deeply.
The one that I heard most often made me want to walk out of the room. I’d pitch an investor while fundraising, and he (always he) would say: “So you’re going to try to turn this into a real company, eh?” As if being my full time job for years was somehow not real. As if you are the arbiter of truth, not my customers. Or me.
If you want to make an entrepreneur feel small, you really want to piss them off, try to inspire them this way. I assume most people who used it thought they were complimenting me, impressed that I was taking this big step or something. But it was a sure fire way to trigger my defenses. When you diminish the work I’ve done so far, it’s hard to see you as a potential partner. I quit my full time job five years ago, and have missed out on hundreds of thousands of dollars of earnings, but asking you for money is what shows I’m serious?
I’m convinced at least some investors did it on purpose, as a form of negging - trying to position themselves as an authority and me as someone who needed their help and wisdom. “That’s pretty cute. Why don’t you get some help from the professionals?” I’m good, thanks.
I know most people didn’t mean it that way, though. Their worldview is just so skewed that if you haven’t raised a ton of money, you’re not really trying. They can only conceive of success if it looks a specific way. You literally cannot succeed unless you do what they do, what all their friends do.
If you’re an investor, advisor, or executive, take a deep look at how you talk to founders. Are you truly complimenting them, or actually diminishing their work? Are you presenting yourself as the arbiter of success, even while you think you’re saying the other person has done so well?
If you’re a founder, know that you don’t have to take it. No one else gets to define success for you. There’s always an in-crowd, but by definition the best results come from being outside of it. Even if you decide you need their money, you don’t have to accept their framing.
I did more writing in 2017 than I ever have before, probably more than I had done in my entire life. I stated at the outset my desire to write in order to learn, and publishing regularly has delivered. More importantly, it forced me to capture and share many of the results of my R&D. The writing topics were primarily venture capital, the software startup ecosystem, and founder optimization, but one of my weaknesses is a drive to the meta, spending time on the tools and systems rather than the work itself. Unsurprisingly, this ground is as fertile in prose as it is in code.
I have done all of my writing on Ulysses, which has been a good tool. I do miss much of the power of Vim for managing text, but the usability trade-offs are usually worth it. Plus, Vim is not exactly strong on wrapped text. Ulysses’s most important capability for me is that it transparently syncs between my phone , both of my iPads, and all three of my computers (yes, I know). I can open any document on any device with no worries (given my iPads are on LTE, and thus can always download updates). Second to that is the ease of getting data out. I was able to text a 5k word document directly from Ulysses on my phone to two different people, because it converts anything to PDF and can send out via the share sheet. It publishes directly to most platforms, so I used it to post everything to Medium. I do wish its backend storage was more visible, so I could version control everything in git, but you can’t have everything.
The only time I ran into troubles was publishing my travel writing - I was copy/pasting photos from Apple’s Photos app into Ulysses, then publishing into Medium, and it turned out that no part of this process downscaled the photos, meaning each was about 20MB. This is fine when you’re on solid wifi, but not so good from a campground in Yellowstone. The primary reason I did not write during the second month of my trip is it was just too painful to publish. Ulysses really fell down here, because when it works, it works great, but when it fails it is miserable. I’d just sit and stare at my iPad for ages, with no visibility of failure or success until the very end, and it would often manage to upload the text but not the photos. The only fix for this was to delete the draft from Medium and try again. Not so great.1
Over the year I became concerned, though. I heard about Andrew Chen, who built a following on successive publishing platforms (e.g., Blogger), each popular and well-funded, only to have the companies disappear (because that’s what Silicon Valley does to most companies). He eventually realized that the only way to consistently reach those who were interested was via email; it’s never going away, subscriber lists are easily portable, and of course everyone knows how to use it. He had to move from letting a platform own his audience to taking control directly, and email was the only real way to do that.
I think Medium is pretty good, and at least for now it has no shortage of funding. Even last year, though, it made well-publicized efforts to retool its business, a clear sign that whatever it was doing before wasn’t working. It seems unwise to bet that a follower on Medium will have any meaning in a few years.
It just so happened that I ended the year with an experiment in their new business model. My series on Venture Capital, in partnership with NewCo, was published behind Medium’s paywall. While the experience was positive overall, and I got paid more for those pieces than I have for, um, all of my other writing ever, earning money isn’t my real goal in writing. Yet, paying writers is exactly what Medium has to figure out in order to attract the content and audience it wants. I appreciated the extra attention working within their paywall provided, but I came out thinking it’s unlikely to be the right path for me in the long term. My goal is to maximize the reach of my writing, and it’s more about the arc of all of it rather than a couple of heavy-hitting pieces getting the most attention, which means our respective goals are orthogonal at best, and in direct conflict at worst.
While I have not written about it, I spent a lot of last year fascinated by email, inboxes, and how we consume content. I’ve been a deep fan of RSS from the Bloglines days (Unread is my reader of choice these days), but RSS is mostly dead (thanks, Google!). The kinds of sites that produced great feeds back in the day grew too big for a hobby. They became either wildly profitable for a small team and thus got destroyed with ads and shitty content (hi Boing Boing!) or people had to back away because it was just too much. Mainstream publications like the NYTimes might still publish RSS feeds (I literally have no idea), but RSS is a poor fit for how much content they produce.
When I look around, it seems that the RSS feeds of ten years ago are now awesome newsletters. See how often your favorite sites talk about their newsletters vs their feeds. I’m pretty confident I’ve never heard a podcast ask me to sign up for a feed, but many casually mention their newsletters. (Well, to be fair, podcast feeds are just RSS, so in that sense it’s survived, but I think we can agree it’s a very different use case.) The market has moved.
This shift is not all peaches and cream. The superiority of email as a publishing mechanism has not brought with it a superior reading experience. Long form content from writers I follow does not belong in the same inbox as requests for coffee meetings, yet that’s where we are. (I asked the Feedly CEO if they would please please add newsletter subscriptions to their platform, and he could only say they were considering it. If you want to build the newsletter reading app, hopefully with an index of great letters to subscribe to, count me in as an early contributor.)
Even with its downsides, I’ve decided to move my writing to my own site via a newsletter-first publishing model. From now on, everything will be published first to that site and the newsletter (sign up now!). There will be exceptions, when publications offer enough exposure that I give them some period of exclusivity. I will also indefinitely duplicate each piece to Medium on a delay, to take advantage of the audience I already have there.
There are enough examples out there that I’m pretty confident this is the right long term answer, but it’s early enough that it feels like an unstable experiment. Like most, I love and hate email, and I am a bit bummed about the extra infrastructure involved in this system.
If you’re still an RSS person at heart, you can always just subscribe to the feed, and if Medium is your bag, at least for now you’ll be able to see everything there, too. Of course I can’t promise how this plays out in the long run - else it would not be much of an experiment - but you can bet I’ll work hard to find the right way to talk with the people most interested in what I have to say.
One note before I go: I could not have made this transition without the help of Mike Julian. He helped set up each of the services, mediated the hiring of a consultant to modify the site, and connected all of the services together. He’s got a great book on monitoring, and is available for consulting on monitoring and observability. I can’t recommend him enough.
Thanks for following on so far. I’m excited about another year of writing.
It’s worth noting that Apple’s iCloud Photo Library did wonderfully here; I could upload every photo to my iPad, and it would sync when it had good data, and sit quietly when it did not. I love asynchronous protocols. ↩
The arrival of the smartphone has convinced the world of the value of great software design, but it’s not all good news
The smartphone has reached more people and delivered more value faster than any technology ever seen. Much of the world has had to adapt to this arrival, but software design suffered the greatest reckoning. As the smartphone ascended, developers finally adopted reasonable design principles, realizing that they could not pack every feature ever seen into the smartphone experience. This recognition of the value of design - and especially, minimal design - is a good thing. Mostly.
I could not be happier that the industry finally accepts that there are principles of design, and there is a practice and discipline behind building great software. It’s great that we’re seeing more focused software that does little, but does it very well, rather than the previous age of the GUI when software attempted to own large parts of our lives by doing anything and everything. For a long time, Microsoft Word was used by nearly everyone who had a computer, and their strategy was to ensure no one ever had a reason to choose something else by building every feature anyone might ever need; their toolbar was the canonical example of never saying no.
The smartphone changed all that. Those rows of icons would fill the screen on a phone and leave no room for typing, and of course, no one would use them anyway because of how different the usage patterns are. As people realized they could no longer just throw in the kitchen sink, they began hiring (and listening to!) actual designers, and those designers have been steeped in the culture of Dieter Rams and the minimalism of the Bauhaus movement, which is awesome. Mostly.
Unfortunately, the phone caused everyone to focus on the final design principle of Dieter Rams (“Good design is as little design as possible”), without apparently remembering the nine that came before it, or why they were earlier in his list. I get it; the design constraints in a phone are intense, and it might not be a good idea to minimize everything, but it sure is easy.
The consequence of this mobile brutalism is a new movement building simpleton tools: Software that anyone can use, but no one can become an expert in.
Trello is a great example. I adore Trello. I think it’s great software, and it’s clearly a success by any measure. However, for all that I’ve relied on Trello daily for years, I feel no more an expert than I did just after starting to use it. It’s not because I haven’t tried; it’s because there’s no depth. You can pretty much plumb the product in a couple of days.
That’s fantastic for getting new users up to speed quickly, but deeply frustrating after a couple of weeks. Or months. Or years. Compare that with Vim, which I still use for all of my code editing, yet it’s so complicated that most people don’t even know how to quit it, much less use it. I’m not going to claim its lack of user friendliness is a feature, but I will defend to the death that its complexity is.
Apple’s Notes is the ultimate expression of this trend in text editor form. It’s a fine text editor. I know some people have written huge, impressive programs in similarly simplistic editors like Notepad on Windows. But I personally could not imagine giving up keyboard navigation, selection, text munging, and everything else I do. The fact that complicated work can be done on simplistic tools speaks to the value of having them, but in no way invalidates the need for alternatives. Yet, on the current trends, no one will even be trying to build this software I love because they couldn’t imagine two billion people using it on a smartphone.
I think it’s fair to say that that’s an unfair standard, and even a damaging one.
I miss the rogue-esque exploration that tool mastery entails. It’s not that I want tools to be hard; I want them to be deep. I want to never run out of ways to invest in my tools. I don’t want to have to swap software to get upgrades, I want to upgrade my understanding instead.
But I look around my computer, and everything on it was designed for the “average” user. I was not average as a CEO with 40+ hours of meetings a week while receiving more than 200 emails a day, nor am I average now as someone who spends more time writing than in meetings. There’s no such thing as an average user, so attempting to build for one just makes software that works equally poorly for everyone.
It is a rookie mistake to conflate the basic user who will never plumb the depths of their tools with the expert user who will learn every nook and cranny of your software. It is a mistake to treat the person who sometimes has to solve a problem the same as a person who spends 80% of their time working on that problem.
I don’t want to be an expert in all of my tools - for all that I take thousands of photos a year, I don’t think I’m up for switching to Adobe Lightroom - but for those tools that I spend the most time in, that most differentiate me, I want the opportunity for true expertise. And I’d happily pay for it.
Back in the days when computer screens were tiny, there were plenty of stats that showed that paying for an extra screen would often give people a 10% or more boost in productivity. I know it did that for me. As a business owner, it was trivial to justify that expense. Monitors cost a lot less than 10% of a person’s salary, and don’t need to be replaced every year. Heck, the whole point of the automation company I built was to allow people to focus their efforts on the most valuable work they could do.
Yet, when it comes to software being built and purchased today, to the tools we use on a daily basis, somehow our software ecosystem is failing us. There is no calendar I can buy that makes me 10% better, no email client available that I can spend five years getting better at.
It’s great that people are finally making software that everyone can use, but that’s no excuse to stop making software for specialists, for experts, for people who could get the most advantage from that extra 10%.
The true story of trying to put Google’s planning system into use
When Google was less than a year old, they began using a planning system presented by legendary venture capitalist John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins. When I went to put it into practice at Puppet in the early days of growing the team, things were not as easy as they appeared. Success involved creation of a complete solution, not just a description of the documents you need to create.
When I went to try to use the system as described by Doerr, I had multiple questions it didn’t answer. Just to start with, when and how do you make and update these OKRs? It’s great to say you should have this recording of your goals, but I could easily come up with multiple conflicting mechanisms for developing it, none of which are obviously better:
The CEO could develop them independently and deliver them to the team
The executive team could develop them collaboratively
They could be sourced from the front-line team
None of these is obviously right or wrong, and of course, neither are they sufficient explanations for how to do it. Do you do it one sitting? Multiple revisions? How long should you spend on it? How often should you update them? Can you change them mid-stream if your situation obviously changes? There’s a lot left to the reader. You can say it doesn’t matter, but of course, it does, and even if you’re right, you still have to pick one. Why go through the effort of describing the output but skip the whole process you used to create and maintain it?
Here’s how we did it.
Startup Days
Starting by reading John Doerr’s original presentation, even though it’s relatively thin. In summary, you should have three to five top-level objectives, and each of these should have a couple of key results associated with it. Together these constitute a company’s Objectives and Key Results, or “OKRs”. These should then cascade down to the rest of your team, so that each team and person has OKRs. This is a useful high-level tool for communication and focus, even in small teams. (Note that I’ll use ‘goals’ and ‘objectives’ interchangeably here; far more people use the shorter term in practice, and we treated them equivalently.)
At Puppet, we spoke of an operational rhythm, which is essentially the set of repetitious tasks we run and the cadence we execute them on to keep the business working. But the OKR system as presented includes no operational rhythm, no indication that people are involved in creating these goals or that doing so takes any time. So we invented our own rhythm:
As early as possible each period, the management team meets to decide the company OKRs. This started out as a 45-minute meeting that just recorded the goals that were in my head, but evolved over years into a two-day offsite where the leadership team first acquired a shared understanding of where the business was and what we needed to do, then built the goals from there. In retrospect we should have put in these longer days earlier; your team should frequently think deeply about what you should be working on, rather than just running all the time.
The rest of the company has some time to build its OKRs from the top-level goals. Initially this was a couple of days, but it eventually morphed into a couple of weeks.
These cascaded goals are then used to modify the company OKRs if needed. (In other words, we supported a merged top-down and bottom-up planning model.) This is when management would learn if our view of reality was materially different from that of the people at the front line.
At the end of every period, the management team records how we did against our goals. Again, this began as just writing down the score, but grew to become a more complete retrospective run by a project manager. This meeting it at most a couple of hours long, and just includes the leadership team.
When we began this process, we wanted short-term goals, so we ran this cadence eight times a year; thus, we called our planning periods “octaves.” As we matured and could think and execute in a more long-term fashion, we reduced this to quarterly.
I think this system is sufficient for most companies of 15 to 250 people. Some companies might grow out of this at relatively few people, whereas others might scale very well with it. I expect most people could scale this system successfully by gradually increasing the amount of time spent on each session, with more time in deep discussion, and also by assigning a project manager to run it. I ran the whole process until we were probably 250 people, which was a mistake that took too much of my time, resulted in too centralized of an organization, and limited our effectiveness because I suck at project management.
Note that these are pointedly not plans; that is, they are not step by step instructions for how to achieve a goal. We’re declaring what we want done, but not how we expect to do it. This is both a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it provides a lot of freedom for people at the front line to figure out the right way of accomplishing something, but it also leaves a gaping hole in your organization. At some point, someone has to actually do the work, but where in your operational rhythm does a team translate goals into a plan for accomplishing them? Do you make that time? We didn’t until far too late, and it mattered.
Scaling
As we scaled the company and this system, we found a few critical gaps.
The biggest one is obvious enough that I cringe now just thinking about it. You would never try to build a product without being clear on who would do the work and, of course, you shouldn’t try to accomplish your company’s goals without assigning each objective and key result to an individual, yet our initial version (and the one presented by Doerr) had nothing to say on people. At some point we added the requirement that every objective had a name assigned to it, which was a huge change for us - and a really positive one.
The lack of accountability for each goal was exacerbated by the fact that we didn’t have any mechanism for in-quarter check-ins on the goals. We’d frequently only find out at the end of a quarter that a goal was going to be missed, when it was far too late to do anything about it. So we built a weekly operations review (“ops review”) where we reviewed progress against the goals. This meeting is a predictive exercise, not a status statement. Goals are green if you expect to accomplish them on time, even if you’re still two months away from the deadline. We mostly focus just on the areas we don’t expect to hit, which allows us to invest early in correcting our execution or changing our expectations.
It’s worth reiterating, because this was so hard to get people to understand: The goal of the ops review was not to describe the status of each goal; it was to build a shared understanding of whether we were likely to achieve our goals and then build an action plan to resolve the predicted misses. The majority of people entered that meeting with a belief that they needed to justify their paycheck, and it took a lot of education to get them to understand the real purpose.
This addition to our rhythm was pretty awesome. In one move, it basically eliminated the firefighting that had driven so much of our execution. We still had fires periodically, but they were actual surprises, not just sudden surfacing of old information, or realizing at the end of the quarter that a goal never had an owner.
The downside of the ops review is that it’s expensive (it necessarily includes a lot of top people at the company) and it takes a lot of work to make this kind of meeting worthwhile every week. I got the idea for this meeting from the excellent American Icon, about how Alan Mulally turned around Ford. A long, weekly operations review with his senior team was one of his key tactics. My team often complained that weekly was too frequent, but if a company as big as Ford was responding weekly to the conditions on the ground, shouldn’t a small startup be at least that responsive?
Around this time, we integrated the budgeting process into the planning process. It’s important to recognize they’re different - you should build the plan you want then find a way to budget for it, rather than building a budget for your departments then letting them decide how to spend it. It’s important that your should be good at both, though, and it was around this stage we started to develop the budgeting skill and learning how to integrate it into planning. That was painful, to put it mildly.
As we scaled, the company goals tended to get expressed in terms of departmental targets within sales, marketing, engineering, etc. When we were small, this seemed like a feature because it had natural lines of ownership, but as we grew it became clear it was a critical flaw. It’s important to translate plans to people and teams, but this was dysfunctional. It discouraged people from building goals that relied on other teams, and thus encouraged silos in the company. Talk about a failure mode. When we added names to each objective, we rebuilt the whole process to be structured from the top down around company goals rather than team goals, which allowed us to crack this departmental view and force shared goals and collaborative execution.
We also eventually added a layer of OKRs above our annual goals, giving us a roughly three year time horizon. These became crucial in sharing and deciding what the priorities were for a given year.
What might come next?
The above roughly describes the system as it stood when I stepped down from Puppet in 2016. It was obvious at the time that we were in need of another step-change in capability in our planning system, but the new CEO took responsibility for driving that. By the time I left, we could see many opportunities to improve what we were doing.
The big one is that we needed to push all the local knowledge about this process into code. We were using multiple different formats and tools, because different meetings require different interactions, and it was too difficult for most people to track what was happening, where, and why. For instance, our source of truth for the OKRs themselves tended to reside in Trello, but it’s a poor fit for storing updates and presenting the predictions of whether a goal would land. I couldn’t imagine trying to run a report on quantitive goals based on Trello data. Thus, we ended up storing the weekly updates in spreadsheets, which are exactly as powerful and readable as shell scripts. It meant we couldn’t trust most people to update the data, because the document was so complicated. I would have loved a single source of truth that anyone could use. In addition, I wanted to have an app automatically pull any data from original sources so I didn’t have team members doing manual work that could be automated (I mean, duh, Puppet is an automation company).
I also wanted a significantly better retrospective process that truly helped us improve the business by laying bare how our wonderfully laid plans went wrong. We were good at the work of looking back and being transparent about where we were, but there was a lot of room for improving how we tie that work to how we operate.
Lastly, I hate that our goals were built around quarters. I think having a cadence for building and validating plans is critical, but it’s silly that this cadence got translated into the timelines for the goals themselves. It often implied that each of our goals would take exactly a single planning cycle. Some obviously do - we have quarterly sales targets that we need to hit during exactly a quarter - but many of our top-level objectives were shoehorned into a quarterly system. I’d much prefer a Kanban-style on-demand planning system that would allow us to have a high-fidelity plan for what we’re working on now, and a quality backlog for what we’ll do as goals complete.
Conclusion
I’m not convinced it matters much what planning and execution system you use, but I’m utterly convinced you should have one. In the end, it’s merely a team-wide mechanism for developing, communicating, and tracking what you’re trying to achieve. It’s obviously important to have goals. I think most of us would agree you should, in some way, share those goals with the team so everyone is working toward the same ends. And, of course, your goals tomorrow should probably be somehow related to your goals today. (This is surprisingly hard.)
If you don’t have one yet, you could do worse than building an operational rhythm from what we built at Puppet. You’ll have to work through a lot of initial discomfort as you translate vague words into technical terms whose meaning is widely agreed upon around your team. But it’ll be worth it.
I’m a tech founder and recovering SysAdmin. I helped found DevOps and grew up in open source. These days I am convalescing from a decade of physical and mental neglect while running Puppet.
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