I always think about it in terms of that Jedi bell curve meme - there are two kinds of Simple. Simplicity on the left of the diagram is naive - it hasn't yet reckoned with the domain's true complexity. Simplicity on the right side is elegant - it acknowledges the complexity, but has distilled it.
Before AI: chop wood, carry water.
After AI: chop wood, carry water.
A cargo bike inside a bike shop. The bike is a white Urban Arrow Family electric-assist front-loading model, with front of bike to left of image.
A bike rack outside the Nelson-Atkins art museum. A white cargo bike is locked to the bike rack. Two children are sitting in the bike's cargo box, with helmets on and backs to the camera. Blue sky in the background with a few clouds.
I always swore that I would never buy a minivan, but I gave in and bought an Urban Arrow Family this weekend. I've wanted a front-loader for a decade - they always seemed prohibitively expensive, but came across this one for 50% off and had to do it. 24 miles so far with both kids, we LOVE it.
Changed my handle from @me.nzen.ski to @menzen.ski - the @me subdomain was fun for a while, but I think it makes more sense to use my actual website as my handle here.
Very happy that #KansasCity took away a traffic lane on Gregory Blvd between Troost and the Paseo and added a wide sidewalk where there hadn't been one at all before. Yay for traffic calming and yay for all the new walking and scootering routes it opens up for me and my kidns.
The most important skillset you can bring to platform engineering work is neither "dev" nor "ops". It is "talking to your users".
I have one! menzen.ski (and I’m actually working on a new post right now, I promise!)
If you see this, post your getaway vehicle
I HAD VISIONS I WAS IN THEM 🎶
I WAS LOOKING INTO THE MIRROR 🎶
Parenting is one big, years-long, lesson in letting go. That thing you think is important is actually not important, and you learn this over and over and over again for years.
Zuck: the average American has three friends
💯
The thing about productivity in a family context is that it has to be in service of the family, not of the individual. If one partner works and one partner doesn’t, but they approach productivity in that kind of shared sense, I have no issue with it.
Tired of reading productivity advice from single people with no kids.
I know everyone says "change tech jobs every two years" but let me tell you, getting to do the end-of-life for things that you built eight years ago is incredibly satisfying work. If you change jobs often you miss out on a lot of learning opportunities that only come with time.
New blog post menzen.ski/posts/2025/0...
This one is for the Content Club organized by @bryanross.me in the CNCF Slack. Our February 2025 theme is "Team Topologies in the Real World". (Bryan and @stevefenton.co.uk have also written posts for this, I've linked theirs at the end of mine here).
Reverse Conway Manoeuvres In The Dark
I was led to believe by R.E.M. that I would feel a lot better about this.
I think I’ve been using it for like 17 years or something at this point 😳
omg omg omg omg
Yeah it’s awful. All my 3yo wants to listen to are the theme songs to “paw patrol” and “blaze and the monster machines”. Those aren’t on Spotify kids but are on regular Spotify. It doesn’t make any sense.
We have Spotify family and the kids have kid accounts, but Spotify Kids doesn’t have all the songs they like 😔
I keep having to move helmCharts blocks out of a base and into an overlay and that feels like such a bad thing to do 😫
The intersection of Kustomize and Helm is an amazingly frustrating place to do work. Each of these tools, on their own, is fine, but I'm not having any fun at all when they're used together.
TIL that while I can exclude my kids' music choices from my Spotify profile, they still get included in my last.fm scrobbles 😫
All I'm asking for is rich metadata applied consistently to every resource in every piece of software I interact with, ever, the ability to query those resources by that metadata easily, and the ability to add my own metadata. Is that so much to ask?
Also zero points, and I’m not even that old!
oh… oh no…
We use ArgoCD with kustomize but once in a while I have to reference a helm chart
indentation issues in helm values.yaml files are going to be the death of me
I don’t know what a Zoom Room is and at this point I’m too afraid to ask.