✍️ Blog

Every election season, we’re reminded that our votes matter. But American elections are more than just a way to choose leaders—they’re a foundational safeguard for the very idea of democracy itself. The principles underlying our electoral system reflect the core American ideal that “all are created equal.” In a republic like ours, elections serve as the bedrock of our democratic values, helping to keep power accountable, ensuring stability, and giving each citizen a voice. Without these regular

Imagine the tense, claustrophobic environment of a submarine, submerged thousands of feet beneath the ocean's surface. Here, every decision is critical, where even the smallest misstep could mean the difference between life and death. On a nuclear submarine in the US Navy, the crew holds unimaginable power and responsibility, serving as a crucial component of the nation's nuclear deterrent and response capabilities. Their duty extends beyond their own safety to the security of the entire world.

Like any good technologists, I'm never one to turn down a nice little rewrite in a different technology just for “fun.” Well, like anyone who has ever proposed such a change, I had my reasons, of course. Previously, I had coded my website in VuePress, but it became a little too heavy to maintain. Searching for a balance between the ease of publishing a blog and the fun of coding my website, I chose to migrate to a self-hosted version of Ghost, the CMS and publishing software. That solved two is

Today, I'll shift from tech to share a spiritual moment. Amidst my son Daniel's injury, I felt a real intervention from the Saints. As they offered support, it brought comfort in our time of need, guiding us through his successful surgery.

Like many things in life, I have always wished I was more of a reader than I am in reality. Blame the speed of modern life, the abundance of screens, or just general laziness; I’ve never been great at sitting down and reading a book. And so it’s only been recently that I’ve given myself a free pass to “read” books via audiobooks, and it has been a game changer. And now I do consider myself a reader — or listener — of books. And no such assertion could be complete without me compiling and postin

⏰Time, mystical time Taylor Swift has consistently demonstrated her unmatched prowess in the music industry. Her ability to sell out football stadiums week after week, effortlessly filling them with her charisma, has made her an indomitable force. She even made a Chief’s jersey more famous than a Chief can. Although I have yet to experience the Eras Tour in person, I've been an avid Swifty for years. My children, who were born around the release of 1989 were dancing to Shake It Off when they st

I love the show Mad Men. I'm not sure any artistic work has so accurately captured the "feel" of an era - from the positive to the negative, from the real to the imagined, from the glamours to the errors in judgment. And to top it off, I love a good Old Fashioned. There are many recurring themes in the series, but a seemingly innocent occurrence that happens a handful of times in the run has always gnawed at me. Don Draper - the main character - goes to the movies in the middle of the workday,

The corner office (ha! Remember offices?!). The coveted title. The authority. These might be what many envision when they think of executive roles. However, the road from being an individual contributor to a manager to an executive in charge of an entire function is one that is much more of a winding road than the traditional image of a "ladder." Or maybe it is a ladder, but with countless rungs missing. I've had the privilege of spending time as an IC, a middle manager at a large organization

Do you think the first all AI Instagram account has been created yet - one that fools people into thinking it's a real person, but all the photos are completely AI generated? I was listening to Bo Burnham's Inside again, which I am convinced will be the key piece of art to come out from the pandemic that explains how it felt to those of us who lived through the pandemic in the United States. At least those of us who like Bo struggle with mental health and are extroverted but were forced inside

A code-breaking Quaker poet from Indiana who hunted Nazi spies? All right, that sounds like some sort of comic-book superhero.

With the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI's GPT-4, the potential applications of this technology in content creation and other industries are staggering. However, finding the ideal use case for LLMs has been a challenging process, and differentiating between artificial general intelligence (AGI) and LLMs can be confusing for some. In this blog, we'll explore what AI and LLMs are good at today, and how you can leverage their capab

Have BrendanAI read this article to you*0:00/4:361× Every so often we hear the phrase “Don't let perfect get in the way of good” – but I am not convinced that goes far enough. What we should say is, “Don't let good get in the way of better.” We need to challenge the conventional wisdom that urges us to avoid the pursuit of perfection in favor of delivering a merely good product or service. While it's true that striving for perfection can frequently be a recipe for disappointment and delay, sett

Have BrendanAI read this article to you*0:00/5:091× Since joining PD in December, I've been learning a lot about our community and what it takes to be a modern security engineer. One of the biggest lessons I think I've learned is: 🤔To be a great defender, you have to think like an attacker Gone are the days when there were very separate teams—red and blue have even become “purple” in many organizations—doing security. And like the terminology or not, security continues to “shift left” and mo

For years, I coded my website as a static site generated amalgam. While I started from the base VuePress as a building block – which is great, by the way – I also spent far too much time coding fun things by hand. While these things (like hidden keyboard shortcuts) are fun, I recently decided that I also wanted to be able to have folks subscribe to this blog….the one you're reading right now. And given the recent turmoil in various social networks with changes of ownership and rules left and ri

As promised in a few of my previous posts, I wanted to write more not only about my career until now, but about where I'm going next – and why I chose this particular course over any other. I want to avoid burying the lede too much, so I'm thrilled to announce that I'm joining ProjectDiscovery as Head of Community. As the makers of projects like nuclei, subfinder, naabu, and many, many more – PD already has a remarkable community. PD is on a mission to bring security to everyone—and their visio

After a little over 5 years, I'm going to be leaving GitLab for my next adventure. It's no surprise to those of you who have been following me that I have absolutely loved my time there. I'm so proud of what we built—and I'm still proud and awed by the remarkable people there. GitLab's values are the gold standard for what it means to be a wonderful company—for the team-members, for the community, and for the shareholders. I hope that I can take even a small portion of that to my next adventure

After a little over 5 years, I'm going to be leaving GitLab for my next adventure. It's no surprise to those of you who have been following me that I have absolutely loved my time here. I'm so proud of what we built—and I'm still proud and awed by the remarkable people there. GitLab's values are the gold standard for what it means to be a wonderful company for the team-members, for the community, and for the shareholders. I hope to take even a small portion of that to my next adventure—which I'

This blog was automatically generated using chat.openai.com and the prompt "Write a blog about security engineering and DevSecOps and why it is the next big thing in software engineering" Security engineering and DevSecOps are rapidly becoming the next big thing in software engineering, and for good reason. In today's world, where cyber threats are constantly evolving and becoming more sophisticated, it's more important than ever to prioritize security in the development and deployment of softw

How did you learn X? (technology or otherwise) Plenty of times, I get asked: "How did you learn X." X could be anything, typically technology related. How did you learn HTML? How did you learn JavaScript? How did you learn Excel? How did you learn PowerPoint? There are two main ways that I've learned every tool I've ever come to be half-way decent at using: 1. Don't be afraid to break something 2. Have something that you want to do with the tool Don't be afraid The first is especially tr

As someone who spends a reasonable amount of time writing, rehearsing, and giving tech talks, I often find folks new to speaking about tech asking me: how do you do it? How do you know that you will be able to write and give an excellent tech talk? The simple answer is: I don't know. An excellent tech talk isn't definable and solvable like an engineering problem. It's part tech, part passion, part storytelling, and part luck. But in thinking about speakers and talks that I've looked up to throu

In the 15 or so years we've been on a DevOps journey as an industry, we've seen several waves of tooling and processes. When teams were wholly separated, each brought their tools to bear on the problem. Then, as organizations brought teams together, they began to standardize onto a set of best-in-class tools. And more recently, groups have spent time on "DIY DevOps" - stitching together tools with custom integrations to attempt to create the original synergies promised by the concept of DevOps.

NOTE: Sorry for the interruption in your regularly scheduled tech content. I swear I'll write more about tech when I can. Okay, I don't pretend to know everything, but I have seen a lot of "whataboutism" around the Russian invasion of Ukraine and "why are we treating this differently than X" Now - all war is terrible...full stop. But I do think several things make this unique: 1. Sovereignty. There is no question in the international community over the sovereignty of Ukraine and its borders

NOTE: Sorry for the interruption in your regularly scheduled tech content. But I had to say something about a release that happened in my home country of the United States today There are only two ways that history will judge the current Republican Party: * As an anti-democratic party that lost and couldn't destroy the American experiment * Or as an anti-democratic party that won and started the end of America. And with it, a slide away from democracy worldwide. There is no other way to loo

Well, it's been a little while since I've written in this space. Who knows why that could be - say maybe it was the holiday time? Or a busy time at work? Or perhaps it's just the ongoing pandemic that is great at taking away the motivation to be productive in any way in any aspect of life. Whatever the reason, I'd love to change the fact that it's been months since I've written anything. To do that, I've combined a few things that I've wanted to do for a while into one "mega" project. And I'll

This is Todd Beamer. He and 2,976 other innocent people died on September 11th, 2001. I didn’t know any of them, but when I went and saw their names etched in metal at the site of the Twin Towers, I sought out Todd’s name. When I touched it, that was the time, the entire visit to ground zero, that I cried. It was because of what he represented to me. He was on Flight 93 - the last of the four highjacked flights that day. The passengers had learned from talking to loved ones that this wasn’t a t

What lessons from the first space race - between Russia and the U.S. - can we apply to our view of the new space race - between billionaires.

Early on in the pandemic, there was a mad rush by many to figure out how to do their jobs remotely. Collaboration, communication, and coordination, all typically done when together in person, were suddenly impossible or highly unlikely. And when you're used to being able to meet in person, "grad a conference room," or be at a whiteboard with others, this can be a very jarring experience. Many of us were not prepared as we've always been in an office and never experienced remote work before. Whi

If there is one thing I've learned about actually doing software work in production environments over my career, it is: debugging is hard. And once you accept that it is hard, you have no option, in my mind, except to fall back on two essential but different tools to address problems. Firstly, the scientific method and the process of elimination. And secondly: as much creativity as you can muster. The Story At a healthcare software company where I served many roles (it was a small operation),

I want to be precise. This isn't from a place of hyperbole - it is in line with the interpretation that Republicans and Democrats alike expressed in Congress. Anyone who protested on Wednesday, peaceful or not, and desired Congress to reject the votes from a state where their candidate didn't win wasn't protesting inside our accepted system of government. They were protesting instead for Congress to overthrow the rule of law, the people's will, and most critically, the Constitution itself. We

Why we need more people like Timnit Gebru "I know enough to be dangerous" is a term I often apply to myself in many technical concepts. Not being a classically trained computer scientist, but a technologist and developer none-the-less I know that (a) I know more than the 'average' person about technology but (b) there are a lot of people that know more than me. Probably nowhere is this more true than with artificial intelligence and machine learning. There are a LOT of thoughts on the current

This blog was inspired by my talk of the same name. Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about the possibility of multi- and hybrid-cloud environments. Many business and technology leaders have been concerned about vendor "lock-in" or an inability to leverage the best features of multiple hyper clouds. In regulated industries, there can still be a hesitancy to move "everything" to the cloud, and many want to keep some workloads within their physical data centers. Today's Reality The

My Last Name is valid My last name is O'Leary. Spelling it over the phone is fun..."That's O, apostrophe, capital L, e a r y." Despite what many developers think, this is an entirely valid last name. I've dealt with folks too lazy to deal with a ' in a last name my whole life, which is one thing. I get it, SQL can be hard. But then many "solve" this problem through form validation that says "please enter a valid last name." Talk about invalidating someone's experience in life. It's not the big

You can also read my blog post on changing the default branch stream upstream in git or renaming your own default branch in GitLab. This post is a living post where I document all the different places where one may need to update the default branch when changing the name of that branch. Contents * GitHub * GitLab * Netlify * GitLab CI/CD All the Places GitHub Scott Hanselman wrote a great post about renaming your branch and updating GitHub. GitLab See my previous post on updating

This article was inspired by Scott Hanselman's article about the same topic. You can also read my blog post on changing the default branch stream upstream in git or changing your default branch everywhere else. Also while you're here, go follow me on Twitter and signup for my blog So let's say you're bought in: master is not a great name for the default branch in your repository. Someone somewhere told you it meant "master" as in "master recording" or "master craftsman," and you just went wit

I've been using Git for years and always took for granted that the default branch name was master. After all, it's been that way since May 2005 long before I started using Git. At the same time, I've been very supportive of efforts to eliminate master/slave metaphors in tech. I hated using those terms for databases or tools I used in my day-to-day work, but I gave Git a pass. I was privileged enough to hold this seemingly incongruent dichotomy in my head as "okay." When pressed and asked, I was

Since I was an early adopter of Slack, I've been using Slack for almost half of my career at this point. I've always been a fan of chat as a way to collaborate with friends and colleagues. Before Slack, it was HipChat - which I brought into my first role out of college. And in college, even, chat was a big part of my life. It probably dates me, but a little thing called AOL Instant Messager (AIM) was a big part of college life when I was there. Yes, Facebook was still ".edu addresses" only, but

If you're just learning about software development, or are brand new to open source, it won't be long before you encounter Git, a source code management tool and arguably one of the most successful open source projects ever. We asked senior developer evangelist Brendan O'Leary to fill in the background on Git's history and successes in honor of its 15th anniversary. What is source code management? Before you start in software engineering, it's important to understand the concept of source cod

What is Firebase? Building mobile apps can be painful - especially when it comes to finding a way to provide all the tooling needed to make the application feasible without becoming an expert in many different disciplines. Firebase from Google aims to take away that burden by providing an app deployment platform and a BaaS - Backend-as-a-service. While the offerings can vary greatly, most BaaS providers include a database, object storage, push notifications and some sort of hosting package. Fir

I'm coming up on my third year at GitLab. Or as some people like to put it - I've been at GitLab for 1,049+ hires. GitLab has been growing rapidly, and I've been lucky enough to be there for three separate funding rounds. All of that growth has been incredible to watch and be a part of. And even before I worked at GitLab, I was a large proponent of GitLab and the concept of bringing CI and CD right next to the code. Having worked as both an Engineering Manager and a Product Manager in the past,

An alternative title for this post could have been: I heard you liked docker, so I put dind. Getting Started It should be clear by now that I love building stuff with GitLab CI/CD. From DNS to breakfast is a pretty wide range. However, past those "fun" use cases, I also like to share some ~best~ practices I have acquired through my years of using GitLab CI/CD. Both for software and non-software projects alike. I crossed out "best" above because I don't really like the term "best practices."

I've spent some time exploring how to apply the concepts of CI/CD to everyday life. In my first post, I went all in - making breakfast with GitLab CI/CD as the orchestrator. In this post, I'll tell you about a home project I undertook over the holidays: getting a Pi-hole up and running at my house. (mmmm 🥧) Pi-hole is a great little open source tool that lets you run your own DNS server on your network and send advertisement and tracking requests to a "black hole" of 0.0.0.0, providing network

A big part of GitLab’s culture is saying thanks to one another for doing a great job. That can be anything from helping with a tough technical problem to simply sharing a nice coffee chat to break up the work day. One day a Sales team member thanked someone from Customer Success for a great demo of GitLab CI/CD. The customer commented afterwards, “Okay, what doesn’t GitLab do?” Plenty of heart-themed emoji reactions followed. We’ve seen users do some pretty amazing things with GitLab CI/CD, fro

Last summer, my wife and I bought a new house for our ever-growing family. Before we moved in, we had a couple of improvements made — wood floors to replace the aging carpet in the master bedroom, some required structural fixes. However, when we bought the house, we knew there would be a lot more we wanted to do over the years. When it came to organizing those ideas into things that need to happen sooner rather than later and those that could wait, however, we found ourselves struggling to keep