This is Bullshit!

tl;dr

  • My colleagues made a funny video when there was an incident
  • Cake makes everything better

    Upgrading Github Enterprise

    Yesterday, there was a new release for our Github Enterprise installation that mitigated a fairly serious vulnerability. This was announced quite late in our work day, but given the severity of the issue I decided to upgrade the appliance before heading home.

The upgrade took a little longer than expected, but it eventually finished successfully and I headed out the door.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but due to a mandatory password change my email wasn’t coming through to phone. When I finally sat down at my computer after dinner a few hours later, I discovered that all was not right in the world. Our Github Enterprise hadn’t been able to accept pushes for the last two hours.

This is bullshit!

In fact the entire Xi’an office had gone to the trouble of making me (and GitHub) a youtube video.
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Thankfully, the issue didn’t take too long to fix. The team at GitHub had already created a new package that fixed the issue.

Some context on ‘bullshit’

Our team in Xi’an put up with all kinds of frustrating problems. The internet and VPN(s) have been known to be unreliable. They occasionally bear the brunt of being a satellite office (getting forgotten when changes are made). There was at least one incident where the team in Xi’an waited through an entire standup without telling the team here in Australia that the sound wasn’t working.

They bear all these frustrations as professionals and with a happy attitude.

A little while ago our CIO Nigel Dalton went across to the Xi’an office. One of the sessions he held was how to express their displeasure in an “Australian” way. Which was basically a lesson in saying “This is bullshit”

While I would have preferred not to be the source of their frustration, I am so very happy that they have learned to express their displeasure.

Sorry cake

Now, hopefully it’s time for me to share something I have learned over many years. Cake makes everything better. If you take nothing else from the blog post it should be this.

I’m trying to work out how I can have cake delivered to a team on the other side of the world. Hopefully when I do they will film themselves eating the ‘sorry cake’.

Update: I’ve successfully had two huge cakes delivered. The team in Xi’an made me a nice video to say thank you.


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