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New Talk: Shakespeare, Bacon and the NSA

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

AI - What can it do for me today?

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

Don't let good get in the way of better

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.

Using PD tools to find my first subdomain takeover

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

Using a katana to migrate my website

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,

Building in the open, again

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

What I learned at GitLab that I don't want to forget

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

Leaving GitLab

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

AI-Generated blog on security engineering.

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 sofware engineering" Security engineering and DevSecOps are rapidly becoming the next big thing in software engineering, and for good reason. In

How to Learn Anything

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

What makes a great tech talk?

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

The Era of Platforms

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

Why is this war different from all other wars?

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

Support and defend the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic

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

New Year, New Language

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

Todd Beamer

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

Michael Collins vs. the Billionaires

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.

Running meetings in read-write mode instead of read-only

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

The Purse Caper: Debugging can be hard

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

My epiphany about the protests

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

Understanding what we don't understand in AI

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

Three keys to making the right multi-cloud decisions

This blog was insipred 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.

What's in a name?

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

Changing your default branch - all the places

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

Rename your Git default branch from master to main (with GitLab screenshots)

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 So let's say you're bought in:

I was wrong

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.

How I Slack

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

A guide to Git for beginners

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

GitLab CI/CD for Google Firebase

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

My next move at GitLab

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

Getting [meta] with GitLab CI/CD: building build images

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,

CI/CD all the things: Pi-hole

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

CI/CD All the things: Introducing Auto Breakfast from GitLab (sort of)

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

Using GitLab to project manage home renovation priorities

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