Articles and talks

By Richard Crowley

2022

2022-11-08 — Mastodon the hard way
2022-11-02 — An AWS account just for getting into other AWS accounts
2022-10-27 — The Rails/Django parable
2022-10-13 — You should have lots of AWS accounts
2022-04-25 — Substrate from Source & Binary

2021

2021-08-03 — Fourth-generation configuration management
2021-03-26 — Technical Ops and Compliance — From Bootstrap to Scale with Richard Crowley, Eliot Durbin interviewing me about engineering, compliance, on-premises software, and more plus some silly stories about graphs

2020

2020-12-04 — a departure from the usual subject matter to document building my Argonaut RM3 (that’s a bicycle)
2020-04-27 — Almost six years at Slack
2020-04-15 — O’Reilly Chaos Engineering

2019

2019-11-12 — 16 hours at a polling place
2019-10-25 — WDR on team composition
2019-08-01 — Disasterpiece Theater
2019-05-05 — Typed Go errors
2019-03-27 — 2019 Santa Clara AWS Summit, where I was the special guest in a session all about AWS KMS, talking about how Slack EKM integrated with that excellent service
2019-03-18 — Audrei Drummond’s How We Built Slack Enterprise Key Management tells all about a project we spent a year together making happen

2018

2018-09-25 — Infrastructure Now 2018, an interview with Julia Grace, me, and many others from across the industry, editied by Jenn Webb, Nikki McDonald, Ines Sombra, and James Turnbull
2018-03-25 — Throwing the Hail Mary and Securing a Job by Dinner, an interview with me by Mark Pydynowski on Monday Karma

2017

2017-09-25 — Slack on Amazon's “This is My Architecture” series
2017-09-07 — Apprentices of Scale at the PagerDuty Summit

2016

2015

2015-12-13 — DevStructure Redux

2014

2014-04-25 — Building web services in Go at GopherCon 2014
2014-04-15 — Certified
2014-01-15 — Building web services in Go at GoSF (video)

2013

2013-12-13 — Go web services with Tiger Tonic
2013-12-03 — A State Machine Datastore in the Wild at Basho Chats 008
2013-11-19 — Regarding retries and restarts at Opsmatic’s tech talks (video)
2013-09-20 — Patterns for scalable web services in Go at Strange Loop 2013 (video)
2013-09-12 — A State Machine Datastore in the Wild at Surge 2013 (video)
2013-08-23 — Taming the Cowboy Laptop at PuppetConf 2013 (video)
2013-08-08 — Developing Operability at Agile 2013
2013-04-27 — Graceful stopping in Go
2013-04-19 — Go acknowledgement test
2013-02-19 — Node.js at Betable at Node.js ++ (Serverside Javascripters) Club SF

2012

2012-08-03 — Federated Graphite
2012-02-25 — Developing Operability at SuperConf
2012-01-03 — Square

2011

2011-10-04 — Blueprints in the new AWS CloudFormation
2011-09-29 — Blueprint: configuration management for busy people at RubyConf (video)
2011-09-21 — Monads without pretension
2011-09-14 — Blueprint: configuration management for busy people at SF Python Meetup
2011-08-23 — Blueprint: configuration management for busy people at SF DevOps Meetup
2011-05-07 — A blueprint is not a diff but it doesn’t matter
2011-04-28 — Extending Puppet at Puppet Camp EU 2011
2011-03-28 — Operable Ruby
2011-03-24 — Why is configuration management software written in Ruby? at Ruby on Ales (with video at 1:12:07)
2011-03-11 — Dependency Management with Puppet at PyCon (long form with video)
2011-01-28 — Debian packaging for busy people — Debra and Freight
2011-01-13 — Git Paid, the programmer’s time tracker
2011-01-11 — Extending Puppet at Silicon Valley Puppet Meetup

2010

2011-11-17 — Dependency management with Puppet at SF Django Meetup (with video in parts two and three)
2010-11-11 — Dependency management with Puppet at Carbon Five
2010-11-10 — Dependency management with Puppet at SFPython
2010-11-08 — Securing and Extending Puppet
2010-10-14 — Securing and Extending Puppet at Strange Loop 2010
2010-10-07 — Securing and Extending Puppet at Puppet Camp 2010
2009-09-29 — Dependency management with Puppet at SFRuby
2010-09-27 — Dependency management for grown ups
2010-08-16 — Introducing Doubledown
2010-07-27 — MultIO Ruby IO Multiplexer
2010-06-24 — Redis in Ganglia
2010-06-14 — rxvt-unicode
2010-05-11 — Debra
2010-05-10 — q, r, s, t
2010-03-10 — Man pages versus RubyGems
2010-02-23 — Clint, a Ruby command line argument parser
2010-02-08 — OpenDNS MySQL abuses
2010-02-08 — Leaving OpenDNS
2010-01-29 — PHP references
2010-01-27 — JSON in PHP
2010-01-06 — Things UNIX can do atomically

2009

2009-09-14 — Turkey typing
2009-09-12 — The case against duck typing
2009-06-27 — BashReduce
2009-06-23 — Building OpenDNS Stats at Velocity 2009
2009-05-01 — (spacetimeshift)
2009-04-26 — Haystack and Whoosh notes
2009-04-09 — Colleges courses I should have taken
2009-04-02 — How-to
2009-03-16 — Distributed version control
2009-03-03 — Drizzle
2009-02-27 — Diversion
2009-01-24 — django-twitterauth
2009-01-13 — Out of paper

2008

2008-12-15 — Django
2008-10-26 — Hacking the Ruby interpreter
2008-10-23 — Allspaw&rsquos playbook
2008-09-21 — Updates to my street sweeping app
2008-09-14 — Dopploadr at Yahoo! Open Hack Day
2008-09-07 — Uploadr extension extensions
2008-09-03 — Bashpress
2008-08-26 — mtrace, and the bug I&rsquove been chasing for weeks
2008-08-25 — So many projects
2008-08-17 — It&rsquosablog
2008-06-04 — PownceFS, round two
2008-05-16 — Where&rsquos my car?
2008-05-04 — Teaching math
2008-04-28 — MacBook Pro updates imminent (speculation)
2008-04-08 — Starting at OpenDNS today
2008-03-22 — PownceFS
2008-03-19 — Oh yeah, that&rsquos right, I went to SXSW
2008-03-03 — Functional programming in C
2008-02-25 — Firefox 3 — more better
2008-02-11 — More GReader hacking — immersion
2008-02-08 — readelicious — hacking del.icio.us directly into Google Reader
2008-02-05 — Stop doing it yourself and use CPAN — curvr-0.2
2008-01-29 — iCal timezones are wrong
2008-01-22 — wp-screenshots plugin
2008-01-22 — Please don&rsquot X-UA-Compatible me like that
2008-01-14 — When you can&rsquot statically link, manifest

2007

2007-12-30 — (Post)fixing your (email) life
2007-12-29 — Irish stew
2007-12-20 — Flickr Uploadr 3.0 lives
2007-12-13 — Launching a localized XULRunner app
2007-12-01 — Fun with Unicode!
2007-11-18 — The 10 essentials (Boy Scout style)
2007-11-15 — MD5 in XULRunner (or Firefox extensions)
2007-11-14 — Bold headers (Design patterns as told by the engineer)
2007-11-10 — Call Comcast to get the real Discovery HD
2007-11-08 — Introducing curvr
2007-10-30 — Meebo platform needs to come to XULRunner
2007-10-22 — HTML layout the XUL way
2007-10-20 — Where did all my XULRunner tips go?
2007-10-05 — Headed to St. Louis
2007-09-23 — JSONRequest amendment
2007-09-16 — Help me decide what C code to write
2007-09-13 — Friend buckets through XFN
2007-09-09 — New domain, but you&rsquod never notice
2007-09-06 — Enough with web desktops
2007-09-03 — XUL and XHTML run together
2007-08-23 — A few reasons TiVo is better than Comcast DVR
2007-08-22 — jQuery conditionals plugin
2007-08-19 — BarCampBlock gets me thinking
2007-08-10 — Cost analysis of running a server at your house
2007-08-08 — Bugfix for nsIStringBundle
2007-08-07 — Threading in Gecko 1.9
2007-08-03 — XUL overlays demystified
2007-08-01 — Faceball
2007-07-26 — Is there honor left in bike racing?
2007-07-22 — Develop and deploy on the same box with Capistrano
2007-07-17 — Cross platform XPCOM (a howto)
2007-07-12 — CVS oops fix
2007-07-09 — Comcast DVR != TiVo
2007-07-07 — Google-burned
2007-07-05 — It&rsquos been two weeks?
2007-07-01 — Do it right
2007-06-26 — On permanance
2007-06-25 — Hello (new) world